Comment by rayiner
10 hours ago
Quite a different situation. An empire is when you go to a populated place and extract wealth from the people who live there. That’s not what manifest destiny was. America expanded into land that was sparsely populated by natives americans and mexico who had no wealth to extract.
> expanded into land that was sparsely populated
Yes, that’s exactly the situation that results in highest income/wealth per capita. As long as that land can be utilized productively.
That last sentence is doing all the work though. North American indians lived on the largest continuous region of agricultural land in the world, connected with perhaps the best river network, and never had above subsistence levels of wealth per capita.
The wealth was in and on the land.
If that was true the native americans would have been rich.
"America expanded into land that was sparsely populated"
What does this remind you of?