Chile

A desert where it almost never rains once held the world's nitrate supply.

The Atacama nitrate fields made Chile rich, drew British capital, and helped set off the War of the Pacific against Peru and Bolivia in 1879. Synthetic ammonia from the Haber-Bosch process collapsed the trade within a generation, leaving ghost towns strung across the desert.

A fertilizer redrew the map of South America and then vanished from the economy.

The nitrate beds of the Atacama were the world's main natural source of sodium nitrate before synthetic ammonia, and they lay in Peruvian and Bolivian territory. Chile took them in the War of the Pacific, fought from 1879 to 1883, which left Bolivia landlocked and made Chilean nitrate a world commodity. The Haber-Bosch process, industrialized from 1913, fixed nitrogen from air and destroyed the trade within a generation.