Comment by rapsey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rapsey | Hacker News Reader

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1. War costs wealth not empires by themselves. GB created an empire, because their technological and intelligence advantage was so high, the amount of war needed to get it was small. By intelligence I mean the conquering of India by exploiting its cast system. The colonies were simply civilizations that were out of date and had a huge informational disadvantage. WW2 changed that as it was so expensive it bankrupted everyone but the US.

> Same reason for why Rome stopped expanding and had so many financial problems. The check on empire is always bankruptcy.

The down fall of every empire is hubris and corruption. It is what is bankrupting the US and what bankrupted the Romans. They stopped having kids, spent their time partying and tried to make up for it by importing and relying on barbarians.

2. Yes. But the state did not recognize the trap or simply did not care because it was not interested. I'm not exactly a historian, but Spain was somewhat known for having an inbred idiotic monarchy.

3. All of which are a result of an educated, effective elite and bureaucracy.

Competent leadership is the difference between El Salvador now and 10 years ago. It is the difference between Singapore and Malaysia. Both countries are a result of pure force of will of competent leadership.

> 1. War costs wealth not empires by themselves.

Let's count the ways that the empire costs wealth

1. You need to pay for civil administration 2. You need to put down rebellions, which means staffing it with troops/police 3. You have to build and maintain infrastructure 4. You have to protect the empire from foreign invasion -- e.g. Julius Caeser needing to fight the Helvetii 5. You have to pay bribes to local notables to be loyal to you

Let's take a look at Rome in Palestine - it had to constantly put down rebellions, build an enormous temple and civil infrastructure, man the area with troops that need to be paid, fight off invaders. Pay off all sorts of locals.

And yes, a big part of that is military expenditure, but the role of the British Navy was not primarily to enlarge the empire but to preserve the empire, protect shipping lanes, etc.

> The down fall of every empire is hubris and corruption.

This is a moralizing view of history, and things just don't work like this.

Corruption is objectively negative. The east indian company not generating wealth is objectively wrong. The roman and british empires were not the same and the roman one required way more war to maintain.

While civil administration, police, courts, infrastructure and army all do cost, wealth, I would argue that they also help to create it.

It's a lot easier to create a software company when you live in a world where the power station cannot be held for ransom by bandits, where everyone is educated and speaks a similar language, when there are laws governing the creation of businesses, a financial system, backed by the government, which enables trade to happen easily, etc.

For example, the Roman Empire, in unifying the Mediterranean, led to a large increase in trade - you can estimate shipping volume across the Mediterranean by counting shipwrecks, and the period of ~0-150AD when the Empire was at its peak had a much higher volume of shipping than preceding and following periods.

I think of administration, police, legal and financial system as something like a capital investment - a bit like buying a widget producing machine - you spend the money/effort/resources on it because you expect to get more out of it than you put it.

> but Spain was somewhat known for having an inbred idiotic monarchy.

Spain wasn't even a really country until the 1700s it was a collection of states ruled by the same monarch but each of them had their government apparatus and elites whose interests didn't exactly align with that of Castile or the king all of the time. That's just in Iberia, the Low Countries which in the early 1500s were effectively the economic and political centre of what we think of as the "Spanish Empire" caused even more issues and ended up being a huge money sink.

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