page_title: Guano Islands Act
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Guano Islands Act / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: An advertisement for Orchilla Guano, sold by B.M. Rhodes &amp; Co. of Baltimore, Maryland. The ad appears in "The Monumental city, its past history and present resources," by Howard, George W. (George Washington), 1814-1888. The text was published in Baltimore in 1873.
context_page_description: The Guano Islands Act is a United States federal law passed by the U.S. Congress that enables citizens of the United States to take possession, in the name of the United States, of unclaimed islands containing guano deposits. The islands can be located anywhere, so long as they are not occupied and not within the jurisdiction of another government. It also empowers the President of the United States to use the military to protect such interests and establishes the criminal jurisdiction of the United States in these territories.
context_section_description: In the 1840s, guano came to be prized as a source of saltpeter for gunpowder as well as an agricultural fertilizer. 
  The United States began importing it in 1843 through New York. By the early 1850s, the U.K. imported over 200,000 tons a year, and U.S. imports totaled about 760,000 tons. The "guano mania" of the 1850s led to high prices in an oligopolistic market, attempts of price control, fear of resource exhaustion, and eventually the enactment of the Guano Islands Act 1856 in August 1856. The Act enables U.S. citizens to take possession of unclaimed islands containing guano for the U.S., and empowered the President to send in armed military to intervene. This encouraged American entrepreneurs to search and exploit new deposits on tiny islands and reefs in the Caribbean and in the Pacific.
  This was the beginning of the concept of insular areas in U.S. territories. Up to this time, any territory acquired by the U.S. was considered to have become an integral part of the country unless changed by treaty and eventually to have the opportunity to become a state of the Union. With insular areas, land could be held by the federal government without the prospect of its ever becoming a state in the Union.
  Under the act the US gained control of 94 islands around. By 1903, 66 of these islands were recognized as territories of the US.
caption: Guano importation was a major business, as this 1873 advertisement attests.
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