[rayiner]

Is that empirically true? The USA was the largest economy in the world by 1890, despite pursing a policy of isolationism for the entire century before that. By the time we entered the First World War, we accounted for a quarter of the world economy, about as much as all of Western Europe put together.

[dragonwriter]

> The USA was the largest economy in the world by 1890, despite pursing a policy of isolationism for the entire century before that.

The US was never isolationist unless you ignore the existence of Native American Nations; it was brutally expansionist from day one. From the time of the Monroe Doctrine, US imperialism expanded even further, leaving the US “isolationist” in most of the 19th Century mainly only in regard to what happened outside the Western Hemisphere, and not even always there.

[rayiner]

"Isolationism" when discussing U.S. history, and as relevant here, generally refers to our reluctance to our avoidance of alliances with European countries. (Or, really, anyone. In this context, "isolationism" isn't inconsistent with "expansionist." It's more about unilateral versus multi-lateral.)

[dariusj18]

I'd be interested in seeing this data. I couldn't find anything with a cursory search, can you point me in the right direction?

[rayiner]

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/2000-years-economic-history...

[dariusj18]

So the source for that appears to be http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/oriindex.htm "Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1-2008 AD" but I can't find the methodology used. It is definitely an interesting spreadsheet to look through.

[xyzzyz]

Maddison is garbage source for anything pre 1800s, FWIW. His all "data" before 1800s is completely made up. See http://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/Book_Reviews/...

[jfengel]

That was also the last expansionist era in world history. The US was able to expand into new, fertile land and exploit new mining resources. The land wasn't completely empty, of course, but it was not being intensely farmed with the new large-scale agricultural techniques.

The expansion wasn't all of it; it was also an era of technological innovation in which the Americans were leaders (though Europe also produced a fair amount of innovation). But the expansionism had another advantage: while Europe was busy fighting a series of wars for control over the same territory, the US had a lot more freedom to devote to increasing production rather than destruction.

So the 19th century may not be an accurate model for the 21st. Isolationism was more feasible then because it was a large, self-sufficient nation. Today, capitalism has broken production down into finer and finer pieces and it's much harder for even a very large nation to compete against the combined strength of the rest of the world. If we don't collaborate, and others do, they'll gain a relative advantage that will slowly eat into our dominance. We can't simply conquer new territory because there isn't any, and even if we did, ownership of land isn't as important in a technological era.

[lkjhdcba]

"isolationism"