Guano entrepreneurs hastily formed the American Guano Company, with a capitalization of $10 million (a number that grows more impressive once you realize that all federal expenditures in 1850 totaled less than $45 million). They begged President Franklin Pierce to send the navy to Howland and Jarvis to protect their diggings from foreign interloper

Institutions like central governments or multinational corporations often seem as grand and formidable as the buildings they occupy. But the institutions themselves—and the power they wield—are invariably shaped by smaller conflagrations at their boundaries, defining the limits of their authority. Pirates occupied that role in the 1600s.

Pirates in the ancient world were both an endemic menace and a usefully unspecific figure of fear, not far different from the modern ‘terrorist’ – including anything from the navy of a rogue state to small-time human traffickers.