Negative, you may have confused the US with Rome. The US is the beneficiary of tremendous natural resources, temperate climate across a vast geography, natural isolation from external threats, and mostly very stable governmental structures.
There's something to be said for relevance. It may be true for nearly every society, but the amount of relevance varies. The US conquered an astonishing amount of territory in recent history, which makes it relevant.
Some people spin this narrative because they think it secures African-Americans' place as legitimate and essential builders of American wealth and power. And sometimes also to justify reparations. But that seems unnecessary and a reactionary narrative that is simply the flip side of the coin of American racist ideology. There's no need to justify, let alone rank, the contributions of any group in the U.S., especially when you do it by reviving horribly misguided economic theories.
Also, don't forget that slavery was endemic to European colonialism in the Americas. AFAIU, only a fraction (less than 10%?) of African slaves ended up in the United States. Brazil alone, for example, may have received upwards of 40%. If slavery were the secret sauce to economic development, the U.S. should be one of the poorest countries in the Americas.
I would love a source for this
>Also, don't forget that slavery was endemic to European colonialism in the Americas. AFAIU, only a fraction (less than 10%?) of African slaves ended up in the United States. Brazil alone, for example, may have received upwards of 40%. If slavery were the secret sauce to economic development, the U.S. should be one of the poorest countries in the Americas.
I don't follow this, why would they be the poorest? Is this based on your previous claim that slavery being a limiting factor?
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/nunn/files/domestic_slaver...
I haven't actually read much research in this area in particular. Frankly, it just seems intuitive to me based on all the literature I have read about American political, legal, and industrial development; the development of other countries, such as in SE Asia; and especially works related to the so-called "resource curse": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
How would this ever apply to the country with the largest economy by the turn of the 20th century?
For one thing, the Confederacy was crippled by its inability to supply its military. The Civil War was arguably the first industrial war, and the slave economy failed miserably at it.
Surely you didn't think north America was terra nullis or that the natives just willingly gave away all those natural resources to European colonists?
Anglo-Powhatan Wars (3 separate wars), Pequot War, Kieft's War, Peach Tree War, Esopus Wars, King Philip's War, Tuscarora War, Yamasee War, Dummer's War, Pontiac's War, Lord Dunmore's War, Cherokee-American Wars, Northwest Indian War, the Creek War, First and Second Seminole Wars, Texas-Indian Wars, Comanche-Mexico War, Cayuse War, Rogue River Wars, Yakima War, Puget Sound War, Spokane War, Snake War, Nez Perce War, Bannock War, Sheepeater Indian War, Navajo Wars, Yuma War, Mohave War, Apache Wars, Black Hawk War, Yavapai Wars, California Indian Wars, Walker War, Paiute War, Goshute War, White River War, Red Cloud's War, Colorado War, Great Sioux War, Dakota War....
And I'm sure I'm leaving a bunch out. The US is definitely built on the spoils of war.
You could say that America was "expanding its empire" but there was not substantial growth after the Gadsden purchase and most of the growth of universities (and the bulk of American power) came much later.
Attributing research and production to the spoils of wars fought nearly a century ago is kind of a reach.
>but the United States has relied almost entirely on resources within its own borders to gain its power.
How did it attain control of those resources? You haven't addressed the parent's point.
The native Americans didn't even know about most of the natural resources, and what they did know about, they mostly didn't make any use of. That's a big part of why they ended up losing the wars against the European settlers: the latter actually turned those resources into wealth.
May we have time to catch up with that knowledge.
You can respect nature and still make use of natural resources. Even if native Americans did the former (see below--some did but many did not), they fell far short on the latter. There were many natural resources in the US that native Americans never made any use of, and European settlers did.
This is an example of the more general fact that the native Americans did not build very much wealth, while European settlers built much, much more. The native American cultures would never have built the medium through which we are having this discussion, for example. Or modern medicine, or modern sanitation, or all of the other things that have led to a huge increase in both average length and average quality of life.
> indigenous Americans had -a lot- of knowledge about their world, and how to care for it.
Perhaps some did. Many did not. Travel around the US Southwest and see how many sites there are where native American tribes lived and either died out or had to move on because they had mismanaged the local resources to the point where those resources could no longer support the tribe.
The Pleistocene North American mass extinction, which wiped out the saber-toothed tiger and North American mastodon, was a result of hunting pressure about 10,000 years ago.
The positive stereotypes you are selling aren't real. They're largely the product of Hollywood (e.g. the "Crying Indian" ads), just like the negative stereotypes of the same peoples. Native Americans are people; given the opportunity they wreck nature, and once given guns and horses they stepped up their hunting of buffalo, for example, to levels that would have been unsustainable even if white people hadn't been killing the Buffalo off at far greater rates at the same time.
The problem was lack of free markets. Free markets are the common thread among successful economic powers. Not population, not resources, not rivers, etc.
Though yeah, free markets are key.
The feature that matters is a free market.
The best thing a poor country can do for its citizens is move towards a free market economy.
In the revised edition of Guns, Germs and Steel Jared Diamond tells us that the "agriculture package" sent from the Fertile Crescent 5kya arrived here late: 2.3kya - perhaps 1,000 years later than expected.
The purported reason: Jomon was perhaps the most sophisticated hunter-gatherer society ever. For instance, pottery was created by Jomon hunter-gatherers earlier than anywhere else.
In part, because of the sheer abundance of natural resources in Japan, the Jomon peoples had developed a rich society that agriculturism for a long time simply couldn't compete with.
(The USSR also captured a lot of German scientists, the results of which were the Soviet successes with rockets and jet aircraft, for example.)
So, sure the USSR might not have been stellar, but in the cold war the camps were already cut either way and you didn't choose the US or USSR.
You only chose to stay were you are or go for top entity of your block.