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Thanks, this seems like an important insight. You could say that the economic value of land just isn't as high relative to labor as it was before, say, 1800. The American "empire" receives economic value from favorable laws in foreign countries: Apple can set up factories in China, the Gap can have its factories in Bangladesh, without the government of the United States actually needing to be in charge of the day-to-day business of government in those countries. And as the economy has become more complicated, it does seem like "workers + incentives" is a cheaper and ultimately more profitable technique than "slaves + force" for extracting value from labor. This seems like a new development, so I'm surprised to hear that it was already in Adam Smith. I guess the modern economy is older than I thought.
I think the critical point is that imperialism doesn't pay if you have to pay your own troops first-world wages. Kipling in Arithmetic on the Frontier is already suggesting that the British Empire on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border was money-losing for this reason in 1886. The situation gets worse, to the point where (even with the oil) the cost to the US taxpayer of being in Iraq was of the same order of magnitude as the total GDP of Iraq.
Profitable small-scale imperialism (called "warlordism") is still going on in the parts of sub-Saharan Africa where child soldiers cost a dollar a day.
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Historically the value of land and borders would have been tied to the people within the land that could be taxed, or chokepoints (ports, passes, bridges) that would keep the people or goods within a boundary to be taxed. A shitload of fertile plains is useless if peasants cannot work it, a shitload of peasants are useless if there is no land for them to work on. People are taxable, land is not. The Congo slavers sold captured slaves because their shitty land was unsuitable for agriculture in the short term, and these captives could be traded for horses guns and shinies that the congolese valued more than the ransoms of inland captures.
We also have to recognize that modern economic concepts like gross domestic product or national output is also a reflection of modernized sociopolitical advancements that allow quantification and tracking of inputs and outputs. A theoretical value of captured land has no real value if the local taxman and the taxpayer all collude to deprive the faraway sovereign of their dues.
In modern terms, the pre-Smith British view of Mercantilist economic victory was 'everyone buys my stuff', which reflects producer superiority and is the focus of trade wars. Smith and later Ricardo explored the theories of trade and comparative advantage to obtain maximal utility (US makes soybeans cheaply, so it should sell them to the Chinese who make plastic crap cheaply for mutual benefit), and this combined with the realization that colonies really were exercises in impoverishment to diminish the appeal of colonization or indeed other proximate wars.
The USA may have actually entered a hitherto unseen economic victory condition, where 'everyone wants to sell to me'. By being the buyer of highest priority, outsiders comport their own supply chains and production processes to the buyers preferences even without the buyer explicating as such. Japanese clothing giants commission Bangladeshi muslims to sew pride flags onto blue eyed blonde barbie dolls because the USA is the buyer they all aim to satisfy, not their impoverished kin or insignificant neighbours.
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Historian Bret Devereaux on his blog wrote about the status quo coalition which is a somewhat related idea; he has a similar bit about how returns from development outpace returns from conquest in the modern era, making modern wars of conquest not economically worthwhile.
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