Territory=Power?

Wait-so if large nations are more powerful due to more room for a larger population, couldn't smaller nations have endorsed a policy of much larger/denser/more numerous cities at an earlier point in time to free up space for additional population growth/agricultural development to sustain the population?
Increasing agricultural outputs through land development and technology seems like the better option to me, since that increases the carrying capacity of the state directly. New crops such as the potato, which can exploit soil that is unsuitable to other crops, are also useful.

That's not to say that getting people to move into the city couldn't help either, as long as they are more productive there. They can always* buy more food from outside the state.

*Well, most of the time at least.
 
As time moves on the size of your territory becomes more and more important as you become better able to actually make use of it.
The key reason Russia and the US were the superpowers of the 20th century is they were freaking big and had lots of room for stuff and lots of resources, whereas Britain, France, etc... didn't.
It isn't the only factor however. And if you go back into history it fades into irrelevancy. Go back into the medieval period for instance and it is completely normal and not at all weird that a city could be more powerful than a country.

Often more territory can be a liability even. You have to pay to govern it, extend services to the citizens there no matter how few there are, etc...
 
Wait-so if large nations are more powerful due to more room for a larger population, couldn't smaller nations have endorsed a policy of much larger/denser/more numerous cities at an earlier point in time to free up space for additional population growth/agricultural development to sustain the population?

Life isn't a computer game.
 
I think the problem with population having any relationship to power is countries like Austria-Hungary, which had a larger population than France in WWI but was a weaker state.
The issue here is that France was populated mostly by Frenchmen (just like Russia had mostly Russiand, and Germany mostly Germans) who were loyal to the state, while A-H was populated mostly by different ethnic groups that hated eachother and the regime. So France had more "usefull" people.

Why can't anybody give a good reason why France's demographics dropped off? There are a lot of theories but no answers. Its wierd and frustrating; mostly becuase I'd love to come up with a TL where they keep growing. Something like 90 to 100 million Frenchman would be interesting.
Luian Boia (romanian historian) has wrote a book titled "France, hegemony or decline" and he gives the following reasons:
-french peasants did not want to divide their land among multiple heirs, so they started to look into birth control methods
- french industry did not develop quickly enough so the cities could not have apsorbed any surplus population from the countryside (as it happened in England)
- early secularization of french society which weakened the church, so it oculd not effectively fight birth control

I seem to remember Sparta did not defeat the Persians, that was Athens. The Spartiates had the crushing defeat of Thermoplyae. The great victory at Salamis was entirely the result of an Athenian politician exploiting a silver mine the right way, and if he'd failed to do that, Persia would have had a new satrapy.
You forget Plateea. Anyway, those battles were coallition efforts and no single Greek state could take full credit (but Sparta was regarded as the foremost Greek state back then and it was a Spartan who exercised overall command al all times, even during the naval battles)

This statement tends to be based on a desire to excuse failure more than objective reality.
Maybe on your part.



Horse puckey, those were military defeats, plain and simple, because the smaller party had freebie logistics from a superpower ally.
Those "defeats" depended on many special circumstances. In contrast, the ancient Greeks could not only defeat the Persians clearly and decisively, they could allso take the fight into enemy terittory. The modern equivalent would have been the Mujahedin defeatign the Soviet Army in Afghanistan and then counterattacking and conquering Tadjikistan


Wait-so if large nations are more powerful due to more room for a larger population, couldn't smaller nations have endorsed a policy of much larger/denser/more numerous cities at an earlier point in time to free up space for additional population growth/agricultural development to sustain the population?
If you do that you still miss out on all the other perks of a large terittory, such as strategic depth or access to resources.
 
You forget Plateea. Anyway, those battles were coallition efforts and no single Greek state could take full credit (but Sparta was regarded as the foremost Greek state back then and it was a Spartan who exercised overall command al all times, even during the naval battles)

Eh, no. Plataea was after Salamis and made possible solely *by* Salamis.

Maybe on your part.

No, on yours.


Those "defeats" depended on many special circumstances. In contrast, the ancient Greeks could not only defeat the Persians clearly and decisively, they could allso take the fight into enemy terittory. The modern equivalent would have been the Mujahedin defeatign the Soviet Army in Afghanistan and then counterattacking and conquering Tadjikistan

Given the huge difference between the Kingdom of Macedon and Athens and Sparta in terms of tapping into Greek manpower, the more accurate equivalent is the Mogidashu clusterfuck being followed 300 years later with a massive East African army led by a powerful conqueror overunning the United States after a ruinous coup and a poor leader who has no claim to legitimacy even on the USA's own terms.
 
No, on yours.
You claimed that the British empire could have won ww2 all by itself, without offering any substantial arguments to back up the claim.




Given the huge difference between the Kingdom of Macedon and Athens and Sparta in terms of tapping into Greek manpower, the more accurate equivalent is the Mogidashu clusterfuck being followed 300 years later with a massive East African army led by a powerful conqueror overunning the United States after a ruinous coup and a poor leader who has no claim to legitimacy even on the USA's own terms.
I wasn't referring as much to Macedon's exploits as to the Greek counteroffensive that followed imediately after Plateea and saw the reconquest of Ionia and Thrace.
 
You claimed that the British empire could have won ww2 all by itself, without offering any substantial arguments to back up the claim.

You missed the two words "on paper" didn't you?

I wasn't referring as much to Macedon's exploits as to the Greek counteroffensive that followed imediately after Plateea and saw the reconquest of Ionia and Thrace.

Wait, you mean when the Delian League was engaging in the kind of actions that are acceptable only when Greeks do them to someone else in this timeframe? That took them years to accomplish and it was not immediately after Plataea at any point. And in practice the Delian League was perfectly willing to butcher as many people as it had to do to ensure its perfect monopoly on power held.
 
You missed the two words "on paper" didn't you?
Some would say that it's exactly "on paper" where the Germans excelled the most.:D Which is why we have so many nazi-wanks in AH. This is why I was intrigued by your statement that the British empire looked better on paper then the Third Reich.



Wait, you mean when the Delian League was engaging in the kind of actions that are acceptable only when Greeks do them to someone else in this timeframe? That took them years to accomplish and it was not immediately after Plataea at any point. And in practice the Delian League was perfectly willing to butcher as many people as it had to do to ensure its perfect monopoly on power held.
The internal politics of the Delian league are irellevant to this discussion. My point was that the Delian league (in fact Athens) could fight a conventional war against a state of much greater size and win, and that such a win would be unheard of today.
 
Some would say that it's exactly "on paper" where the Germans excelled the most.:D Which is why we have so many nazi-wanks in AH. This is why I was intrigued by your statement that the British empire looked better on paper then the Third Reich.

The total manpower pool of India alone is equal to that of the Soviet Union and the United States.......

The internal politics of the Delian league are irellevant to this discussion. My point was that the Delian league (in fact Athens) could fight a conventional war against a state of much greater size and win, and that such a win would be unheard of today.

On the contrary they are very relevant to this discussion given that the Delian League was not a state but an empire reliant on crude brute force.
 
The more territory, the more powerful you are

Power is depedent not on how much territory you have, but on your wealth and population, and a few other things.

Because otherwise Congo, Kazakhstan and Libya would be major world powers and Canada would be a superpower.
 
The more territory, the more powerful you are

Power is depedent not on how much territory you have, but on your wealth and population, and a few other things.

Because otherwise Congo, Kazakhstan and Libya would be major world powers and Canada would be a superpower.

Dependent on several factors:

Resources.

Population.

Wealth of the land.

Plenty of room.

Fertilal Land.
 
The USA is definitely a freak - nothing in Eurasia compares to its circumstances.

Or in America, either.
USA is like easy mode nation, seriously. Lots of settlers, lots of good land and resources that weren't very interesting to most other colonizers, nearby lands of foreign countries sold/taken by colony or country. All nearby nations are weak, focused elsewhere or unstable. Compare early 19th century USA to Brazil, for example.
 
Or in America, either.
USA is like easy mode nation, seriously. Lots of settlers, lots of good land and resources that weren't very interesting to most other colonizers, nearby lands of foreign countries sold/taken by colony or country. All nearby nations are weak, focused elsewhere or unstable. Compare early 19th century USA to Brazil, for example.

With the flip-side that the USA is really the Ted Baxter of Badasses, having invariably fought only enemies far weaker than it is, having tended to do very badly when it has to come up with most of its own stuff, and being the only society in human history to have seen abolishing slavery at the point of one side winning a civil war instead of by decree like civilized cultures do (and equally fail, but the failures are less menacing without gigantic bloodbaths that precede them).

And I'd hardly claim early 19th Century Century USA or late 18th Century USA was a paragon of stability. The change to the Articles of Confederation was on very thin legal grounds, if any at all, in response more to rebellion than to any kind of legal aspect. The Old Northwest Indian War was one of the largest and most brutal Indian Wars and did not fully end until the War of 1812, there's the Nat Turner Rebellion and Andrew Jackson engaging in the kind of stunts that in most societies would have seen him labeled a warlord as the most polite term of reference, and there's the whole expulsion of loyalists thing........

In fact if someone were so inclined the Articles of Confederation could be used to make the argument that the first US attempt at self-government was an inglorious flop.....
 
This can be considered a question in international politics. When I studied IP, I was asked to rank the factors that determine an actor's power (wealth, military might, population, topography). I ranked wealth first, and topography last. However, a nation's population and its natural resources and thus its economic dependence on foreign countries are relates to its size and to the amount of arable land available. Still, nations today grow stronger not through conquest, but through economic development. The reason China is destined to become a superpower is because its economy grows so fast and can keep growing for many years, not because of its many conquests.
 
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