In the summer of 1902 two ships raced from opposite sides of the Pacific toward a reef-ringed atoll covered only in birds and birdshit. The rock was named Marcus Island (J: Minami-torishima), and despite its minuscule size it now threatened to provoke a diplomatic confrontation between the United States and Japan, two empires that in the previous years had expanded across the Pacific towards each other with startling rapidity. This chapter explores how booming demand for commodities such as plumage and guano fertiliser encouraged prospectors to stake claims to uninhabited or marginally inhabited bird islands. To do so they deployed the rhetoric of colonial boosterism, exploiting ambient cultures of imperialism to persuade their governments to assert territorial sovereignty over them. Yet international law was vague as to what constituted legitimate occupation of ‘uninhabited’ territory, setting the stage for confrontations over atolls such as Marcus in 1902.

Chapter 3 shifts the focus to the Hawaiian archipelago, c.1898–1911, newly annexed to the US as part of the sudden irruption of American empire in the Pacific. American ornithologists and naval officers discovered that Japanese bird-hunters were regularly operating on otherwise uninhabited atolls in the outlying Northwest Hawaiian group. Inspired by a mixture of concern for animal welfare, geopolitics (the islands were potentially valuable as cable-landing stations) and ambient racial anxiety about Japanese immigration, US colonial administrators deployed nature conservation as a means of asserting sovereignty over uninhabited space. Key to this process was the scientist William Alanson Bryan, who had witnessed the Marcus Island Incident at first hand and was determined to protect both American birds and territory from Japan’s advance into the Pacific. To this end, he successfully lobbied Theodore Roosevelt to establish the Hawaiian Islands Reservation, forerunner of today’s Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.