Unfamiliar Fishes

Nationalism was seizing the country, all the more so as the First World War approached. And as the idea of the nation—a union of states sharing a culture, language, and history—grew in prominence, the colonies seemed more distant and nebulous, literally vanishing from maps and atlases. For the guano islands, the disappearance was more than cartogra

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In the late 1860s the president of the Dominican Republic signaled that he would welcome the U.S. purchase of his country. President Ulysses S. Grant was eager for the deal—the Dominican Republic was, after all, prime sugar and coffee real estate. Yet even with a rich country served up on a plate, even at the urging of a popular war-hero president

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The bill passed, and speculators scrambled to stake their claims. It was another land rush, this time in the Pacific and the Caribbean. The first batch of islands was added to the United States in 1857. By 1863, the government had annexed fifty-nine islands. By the time the last claim was filed, in 1902, the United States’ oceanic empire encompasse

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The colonies were, for men like Burnham, playgrounds, places to carry out ideas without worrying about the counterforces that encumbered action at home. Mainlanders could confiscate land, redirect taxes, and waste workers’ lives to build paradises in the mountains. Filipinos, for their part, were relegated to the sidelines. The segregated spaces at

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