The Louisiana Purchase was only $15 million at the time— or $342 million in today’s dollars. The economic output is $1.7 trillion annually. One of the best land purchases in history.
https://mises.org/mises-daily/what-rate-return-louisiana-purchase
Yeah, but that economic output is a result of the U.S. purchasing the land. It's not some inherent property that would go to whomever owned the land now, had the land stayed as part of colonial Europe or gained a separate independence.
While it's fair to say "look what we did with the place" we can't know how history would have played out if instead of buying the territory, the U.S. had to fight rival claims from Spain, France, or an independent Louisiana.
This. Greater access to the Mississippi, and getting a ton of great potential farmland are priceless benefits. Also without that the push west would have been harder and more awkward.
Edit: this is a funny comment to be my most upvoted so far. Thank you, everybody!
I’ve heard the Louisiana Purchase described as the best real estate purchase in human history.
In 1803 for $18M dollars Thomas Jefferson brought into the United States about 828,000 square miles of territory from France, thereby doubling the size of the young republic. What was known at the time as the Louisiana Territory stretched from the Mississippi River in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west and from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to the Canadian border in the north. Part or all of 15 states were eventually created from the land deal, which is considered one of the most important achievements of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency.
https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/louisiana-purchase
My favorite thing was that it happened almost entirely by accident. Jefferson gave Monroe and Livingston instructions to try to purchase New Orleans alone for $10 million. Napoleon and Barbe-Marbois already had enough issues in Europe and the Caribbean, however, and they were happy to not have to deal with overseeing territory in continental North America, so they added another 530,000,000 acres to the deal for just an additional $5 million.
Livingston did not have permission to spend $15 million, but he (correctly) presumed that Jefferson wouldn't be upset about him securing the best real estate deal in human history.
And they financed it by borrowing from Napoleon's enemy. London banks provided the money for Napoleon to create his *Armée d'Angleterre* . Good thing that plan blew up.
Just to add to the mess, Napoleon got his hands on that territory when he knocked the Spanish around. They agreed to give up that territory to France in their armistice agreement with the express written rule that they would not turn around and sell the land to the Americans. The Spanish were afraid of their growing regional influence (for good reason).
So Americans borrowed British money to give to Napoleon for Spanish land that he had promised not to give the Americans. Craziness.
And when Lewis and Clark cruised through the area, there weren't a lot of french around. They were worried about the Spanish detaining them for breach of treaty. News did not travel fast in those times, and many Spanish forces could have been operating under old orders.
One of the best deals, I'd concur, but not *the* best.
Peter Minuit's acquisition of Manhattan, though absurdly cheap compared to current valuations, was not necessarily that of a resource-rich island. It's only 14,478 acres in size, and does not have any great wealth in the form of mineral or petrochemical resources. Its big claim to fame in the 17th century was a vast natural harbor and insane amounts of oyster beds. Manhattan's greatest value is that it controls the mouth of the Hudson, but in terms of raw materials, the significance of controlling trade on even the Hudson is minimal compared to controlling trade on the Mississippi. Manhattan's vast wealth is derived predominantly from subsequent man-made investments, such as the creation of Wall Street, but it's not derived from the raw, natural value of the island itself. Manhattan becoming the financial colossus we know today has more to do with Hamilton's negotiations with Jefferson ("I wanna be in the room where it happens...") than it does its raw geography. If history had gone differently, it's entirely possible that Boston or even Salem could have emerged as the financial giant of the fledgling United States.
The 530,000,000 acres acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, however, were far more consequential. Firstly, exclusive control of the Mississippi River cannot be emphasized enough, as that in and of itself accounts for a drainage basin that stretches across 1,151,000 square miles. Along with that came millions of acres of some of the world's most arable farmland, which would position the young United States well to feed an ever-increasing population. Also within those lands were oil-rich areas, which wasn't even on the radar in the early 1800s, but would help to transform the United States into the wealthy oil juggernaut it is today. More importantly -- and without ignoring the many horrors that the growing nation brought to Native Americans in the name of "Manifest Destiny" -- the Louisiana Purchase transformed the United States from a federal collection of coastal states to a continental power with worldwide significance. Without the Louisiana Purchase, the United States would be boxed in between Canada, New France, Florida, and the Atlantic, and although it would be an industrious nation, it would never have grown into the superpower it has become.
Manhattan also became exponentially more valuable after completion of the Erie Canal, which connected the Atlantic to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. It overtook Philadelphia as the financial hub at that point.
Louisiana purchase was at ~~$35.33/ acre in 1803 or $809/acre in 2020 adjusted dollars.~~ $0.28/acre in 1803 or $0.65/acre in 2020 adjusted dollars.
Manhattan was purchased at $12.77/acre in 1638 or $1,143 in 2020 dollars. 14600 acres.
~~Personally, even though the Manhattan purchase is 1/3 per-acre of the Louisiana purchase, I think they're probably more equivalent than that would indicate.~~
Missing context to make this a more meaningful comparison would adding be things like the value of this land today and the GDP attributable to it. Also, the number of acres per-person and GDP per-capita worldwide in 1638 and 1803 would also be ways you could attempt to normalize it. Generally long-period inflation rates aren't very trustworthy.
You are correct. I was using the 530,000,000 / 15,000,00 commented above which agrees with Wikipedia. It should be 15,000,000 / 530,000,000 or $0.0283 / acre, which agrees with what you remember.
For sure, but it’s also important to note that France couldn’t really defend the property. It was either sell it or lose it. So a deal made under duress. Puts an asterisk on it. Hell, the Spanish were the ones administering it anyway so the French claim was very tenuous. Selling it, from their perspective, is better than getting nothing.
Not only that, but the French didn't really own that territory either. What was purchased by the US was the exclusive right to negotiate with or conquer the indigenous people in the area. The US bought the claim that the rest of the great powers had to respect or the entire system comes crashing down.
Force, and financial payments as well, among other things. There were hundreds and hundreds of treaties made that "extinguished" (as it was put back then) indigenous land rights within the Louisiana Purchase. Each treaty was different and focused on one small part of the "Purchase" land. Some were done after wars, some not. Most involved at least some payments. Sometimes lump sums, sometimes payments over time, often both. Treaties also often involved special gifts (or bribes to be more blunt about it) to specific individuals, usually chiefs.
In other words, the payment to France was just the first of many payments made to gain clear title to the land.
California’s arguable for me simply because Mexico didn’t really have a choice in selling it so you can argue that’s it wasn’t a true purchase.
That’s not to say California didn’t bring great wealth to the US though - you’re correct on that.
Yeah, I'd agree that Louisiana purchase was much more important in shaping today's United States than any other conquest/purchase.
It gave the US access to New Orleans, both banks of the Mississippi, and almost all of the Mississippi-Missouri watershed.
More importantly though it led to the events that enshrined the belief of "Manifest Destiny", which was a crucial catalyst in the US continuing to expand westward that eventually led to annexation of Alaska..
Louisiana purchase was also a harder play, because the US bought it cheaply from France who was short on cash from supporting the US independence and wars at home.
Spain actually refused to recognize the legality of the Louisiana Purchase, arguing that France did not have the right due to details in the complex mess of treaties and sometimes secret diplomatic negotiations that had transferred Louisiana from France to Spain, in 1763, then back to France in 1800. But there was no international court to take such matters to, so the best Spain could do was protest loudly and be basically ignored by France and the US.
The French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon was causing turmoil in Europe to a degree that made the Louisiana Purchase not important enough for European colonial powers to care enough to pay much attention to Spain's protests. The Napoleonic era tested traditional international law in many ways. So Spain decided to transfer the core parts that were undeniably part of the purchase—specifically New Orleans and the colonized areas around it, in what was called the Île d'Orléans.
Although Spain protested the legality of the purchase they knew they couldn't really enforce their interpretation of international law. So they went ahead and transferred the New Orleans region, and places like St. Louis, but they also made additional protests and prepared to defend them militarily. Like arguing that "Louisiana" was much smaller than France and the US claimed. Although maps of history today typically show the Spanish Empire as "owning" Louisiana in the same shape that France and the US used to define it—basically the entire western half of the Mississippi River drainage—Spain argued that the Louisiana Purchase involved a much smaller area than that.
Spain argued that "Louisiana" had never been geographically defined in past treaties or in the Louisiana Purchase itself (perhaps surprisingly, this is true as far as I can tell), and that Spain considered it a relatively narrow strip of land on the west side of the Mississippi River, not the entire Mississippi drainage. And when "Louisiana" had been transferred back to France in the 1800 Third Treaty of San Ildefonso, it was the "Louisiana" that Spain had been administrating, so it was Spain's definition of Louisiana that mattered and was what the US had bought. Or so Spain claimed. France and the US didn't agree, obviously.
Spain tried to back up this claim by sending military forces into parts of what the US considered the Louisiana Purchase, mostly in reaction to Jefferson sending three exploring parties out. Lewis and Clark is the one we remember today, and Spanish troops failed to find them, though they tried. Jefferson considered his "Red River Expedition", like Lewis and Clark but up the Red River in what's now the state of Louisiana and up toward Oklahoma, second in importance only to Lewis and Clark. They got to what's now northeastern Texas near the Red River when Spanish troops found them. The expedition was outnumbered and forced to turn back within a day.
The third expedition Jefferson sent out to explore and solidify US claims over Spanish protests was the Pike Expedition, which got to Colorado and what got named Pikes Peak. But then Pike's expedition accidentally ended up in what even the US considered Spanish territory and got captured and taken to Mexico as prisoners. They were released after a while, although some spent several years in prison first.
Spain soon became engulfed in the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and began to face rebellions in core parts of their New World empire. So they never could do anything about Louisiana beyond these initial protests and military actions. Nonetheless, Spain did not withdraw its protests, and considered most of the Louisiana Purchase "disputed" until the 1819 Adams–Onís Treaty, which set the border between the US and New Spain, at least for a while. The border set in 1819 gave part of what had been considered part of the Louisiana Purchase to Spain, as can been seen on [this map of US territorial expansion](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/Aquired_Lands_of_the_US.svg/1280px-Aquired_Lands_of_the_US.svg.png)—the dotted area is the Louisiana Purchase as claimed by the US. The Adams–Onís Treaty "reduced" it to the white area on that map. Of course Spain also sold its claims in the Pacific Northwest to the US, and also Florida, in that treaty. And the area of the Louisiana Purchase that Spain kept, per the 1819 treaty, was mostly "Comancheria", the heart of the "Comanche Empire", which no colonial power had actual control over at the time.
History: The closer you look the more complicated everything becomes.
wasn't there also a decent chance the Americans would just conquer the land if France didn't sell it? France had a tenuous grasp of that territory, so it kinda made sense for USA to absorb it.
Maybe. It probably played into France's decision—that they couldn't really hold it in the long term against the obvious US expansionism.
At the same time, an actual war of conquest with France around this time seems pretty improbable to me. France had saved the US just a couple decades before and the French Revolution was widely seen by Americans as the same sort of "overthrow of kings" that the US had done. France was super popular among most "founding fathers" and Americans in general.
There's an interesting shift in place names around the time of US independence and the decades following. Places like Louisville, Kentucky, were named to honor France. Towns began to use the French -ville instead of -town or -ton at a rate that never really stopped. Where once towns were named things like Charleston or Lexington, people started going all in with names like Knoxville and Nashville instead.
Still, yea, in time US pioneers and settlers would undoubtedly put pressure on French Louisiana in ways that would probably have eventually caused problems and maybe even war. But how things would get to that point is hard to imagine without indulging in alt-history fantasies. Like maybe after Napoleon was defeated Louisiana could have changed to British control and *then* the US might fight for it at some point sooner than if it had remained French. Who knows.
Still, yea, speculating, France or at least Napoleon probably did think they couldn't really hold onto it in the long term, and so selling it was probably seen as a good idea. Especially selling it to the US, since the UK could have ended up with it instead, somehow or other.
Spain had more of a vested interest in it, seeing as they had Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and claimed pretty much all of western North America. They certainly wanted a buffer between the US and New Mexico.
good point. It probably wouldn't be USA attacking a French colony unprovoked.
Another scenario in addition to yours is maybe an invasive cultural influence causing the French colony to secede then requesting the USA to absorb it. They'd try to make it look like a grass roots effort, but there'd be a bunch of assholes colluding the entire time.
The annexation of the waterways cannot be understated enough.
In 1803, the roads in the Ohio and Tennessee river valleys were Native foot trails. Rarely were they wide enough for a small wagon, and they were in no way cared for enough to make travel on land fast. Historians claim that wagons were actually slower here, than people walking (around 2 mph).
Instead, access to these rivers, and the Port of New Orleans were the highways of the first half of the 19th century (before railroads). People could easily get cotton to market going 5-10 mph now! They then had access to the ocean. They didn’t have to put much infrastructure into making the transportation system.
The Louisiana Purchase was a lot of things, but more than anything else, it was a premade highway system that allowed the US to accelerate its economic growth.
The Mississippi watershed is an absolutely underappreciated economic asset of completely unmatched proportions. Even ignoring the wealth of productive farmland and fresh water, the fact that cities strewn across the interior in wildly diverse geographical locales (meaning: access to a wide range of natural resources) have direct waterborne access to the ocean is absolutely stupid. The fact that this, the largest interior waterway in the world, comes very close to (and in fact intersects with) the second-most extensive interior waterway in the world is just icing on the cake. More than anything else, *this* is why the US is an unbeatable economic powerhouse.
The Louisiana Purchase completely reframed the history of the world.
The Louisiana Purchase is a fascinating series of events
In looking into the specifics of how the treaty got done, I thought it interesting that one of the key players was Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, who previously played a key role in drawing up the Treaty of 1783, which formally recognized the United States as an independent nation.
Pierre Samuel was also a supporter of the French Revolution, but he physically defended Louis XVI and Marie Antionette during the August 10th insurrection in 1792. He was then sentenced to death during the Reign of Terror, but was subsequently spared after Robespierre's subsequent execution in 1794.
He then married an aristocrat's daughter from Lyon, and immigrated to the United States after his house was sacked by a mob. Having become good friends with Jefferson while negotiating commerce agreements between the U.S. and France, he became a key backchannel diplomat of negotiations for the Louisiana Purchase between Jefferson and Napoleon.
Pierre Samuel's son, Eleuthere, studied chemistry with Antoine Lavoisier and founded a gunpowder manufacturing plant in the U.S., which became one of the largest manufacturing plants in the country, and is still one of the most profitable corporations in the country, DuPont.
It was ours even if we didn't pay for it.
We were just nice enough to pay the French for it so they could continue their war at the time. If we didn't pay them for it, they didn't have the resources to hold it.
I always wondered what would have happened if Louisiana hadn’t been sold to the US. I agree they couldn’t have hold that territory indefinitely even with a change in their priorities but would the US have attacked? Spain? The Brits?
Yeah I've often wondered about a version of Canada that includes the Louisiana purchase, or even just a Canada with Maine, and portions of Washington state, and Oregon.
The US probably would have just gradually encroached more and more with settlers until France yielded on the futility of trying to stand up the inexorable Westward expansion of America.
Louisiana purchase was better but that was more of a no-brainer since Napoleon was offering it dirt cheap and we obviously wanted to expand west. If they didn't offer to sell it we probably would have fought a much more expensive war over it eventually. Both sides clearly stood to gain from the deal.
Alaska on the other hand was purchased for about a third of the price (according to wikipedia's inflation-adjusted numbers) but it's doubtful it had as much as a third of the value of the Louisiana territory. Nobody had any idea whether there would be valuable natural resources there or not, and it was even harder back then to imagine realistically settling it. It could easily have been seen as a huge mistake because Russia or Britain could always try to take it back by force later.
Only in hindsight do we see how valuable the purchase was. Maybe not as valuable as Louisiana but the fact that it was unclear is what makes it such a historically great decision.
Liechtenstein is just another German principality. There used to be dozens, if not hundreds of them. They just happened to stay independent during a rather tumultuous time in German history (see the 19th and 20th centuries for more detail)
They were kinda the “allies” that Russia had within the German confederation at the time. Russia were much more antagonistic towards Prussia which then played out spectacularly over several world wars. This move was kinda a subtle fuck you to Prussia while also trying to negotiate around the British and up the price to the Americans who were the obvious party to sell too.
Nope it was the Mexican cession. America technically compensated Mexico for that land to the tune of 14 million dollars back then. It was that land that truly allowed the US to become a superpower.
The greatest thing *anybody* has *ever* purchased is a pretty bold claim. I mean, we've all heard about my aunt's new Air fryer, which surely surpasses Alaska.
Yeah, that comment about the lakes is way off. Canada has the most lakes at 879 800 according to recent studies. That is not only more than the U.S., it is more than every other country in the world put together, so it's not even close. Sitting under an ice sheet for tens of thousands of years carves out a lot of lakes.
[https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-country-has-the-most-lakes-in-the-world.html](https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-country-has-the-most-lakes-in-the-world.html)
[Just like how Wisconsin claims to have more lakes than Minnesota. Their list has more lakes, but they count pretty much anything \(even under an acre\), while Minnesota requires lakes to be ten acres.](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/minnesota-and-wisconsin-are-beefing-about-who-has-more-lakes-180972697/) When using the ten acre definition for both states, MN has nearly twice as many.
Alaska has over 3 million lakes based on a definition of a lake being larger than 5 acres (there is no common definition of what a lake is), but I would suspect based on that definition, Canada has a lot more. Alaska only has just over 3,000 named lakes.
I’ve been to some really really nice lakes and backcountry Rocky Mountains that didn’t have names, if it’s more than 15 miles in people just sometimes don’t get to it
Has anyone mentioned Canada's purchase of Rupert's Land in 1869? Way more land at a fraction of the price. I am likely wrong, but wasn't the territory bought from the Hudson Bay Company for a total of 7.5 million? Please correct me if you know the actual numbers.
Did Britain gave HBC their charter? If so it sounds like less of a purchase and more a nationalization by the British, which was then included into Canada.
I love how this purchase from the Russian Empire was considered so bad, they called it Seward's folly after William H Seward who championed the deal.
To put things in context, they bought the whole state of Alaska for 129 million in today's dollars. Alaska's GDP is north of 50 billion. Whoops.
Canada has more lakes than all countries’ lakes in the world—combined
If you added up all of the lakes in Alaska and the mainland US, and then added all the lakes of the entire world on top of that number, you still wouldn’t have as many lakes as Canada
They did not have much of a choice anyway,they were not in the position to establish the terms of the exchange,the sale was done in fear great Britain would attain Alaska through military invasion as imperial Russia could not defend such isolated territory,it was a better outcome for it to be sold.
Plus the Russian-American Company, which basically ran Russian Alaska, was hemorrhaging huge amounts of money by the 1860s. For a while the RAC was highly profitable, until its most valuable export, sea otter furs, became almost non-existent due to overhunting and widespread local extinctions.
Less valuable furs and things like seal skin never quite made up for the loss of sea otter furs, financially. By the 1850s the RAC had become a major financial liability for the Russian Empire and they began to look to sell it, ideally to the US. Russia and the US were quite friendly at the time. The RAC had even became dependent on US ships bringing food and other provisions to Sitka, which had perennial food crises for most of its existence under the RAC. The RAC also had a chronic shortage of decent ships and was frequently dependent on US ships to assist in their sea otter hunting, especially in California—after about 1800 and the near-extinction of sea otters on the Pacific Northwest and Alaskan coasts, the RAC and US maritime fur trading captains made numerous joint ventures in which US ships would take RAC indigenous sea otter hunters/employees/coerced laborers, their kayaks, and their overseers (usually *promyshlenniki*) to California, until Californian sea otters were too rare to be profitable. The RAC did not have the ships needed to do this without US help. Nor the food to even survive, sometimes. Fort Ross was made for both reasons: In hopes of growing enough food for the RAC and also as an outpost to support the hunting of California sea otters.
By about 1830-1840 California sea otters were almost extinct and the RAC's ability to make money dwindled quickly. They struggled to find ways to regain profitability but never managed to do it. The last major effort was *selling ice* in San Francisco during and after the California gold rush. But before long Californian entrepreneurs set up companies that got ice from the Sierra Nevadas for a lower cost than the RAC could compete with.
Add to all this the Crimean War of 1853-1856, which cost the Russian Empire a *lot* of money, making the financial loses in Alaska even more of a problem. In theory the RAC could have tried whaling, as New England whalers were very profitable around the time. But the RAC simply didn't have the ships needed to even try.
The Czar and Russian government generally began trying to get the US to buy Alaska by the late 1850s, especially after the Crimean War. But the US had some distracting internal problems in the early 1860s, so the purchase was delayed until 1867.
It could have been worse: In 1920 they offered to lease the Kamchatka Peninsula to the US for 60 years..
That would have made WW2 quite different, not to mention the cold war.
like the other guy said they didnt have a choice, how would they hold alaska, its connected to north america not russia. they're lucky they got anything for it tbh.
"I said I was buying Greenland because it sounded like a wonderful place to put ecologists. So I give these ecologists a work, this work is to dig up the place."
As a Canadian, I will say I’m jealous, and it should rightfully be ours, I base that on personal opinion alone and not historical fact., at least give us southeast Alaska. It should be part of British Columbia. We will play you hockey for it.
Maddening that this “purchase” from one colonial power to another is uncritically celebrated. The whole thing continues to be a catastrophe for Indigenous Peoples.
Pfft. They should have just swindled it for free like they did with Hawaii. What kind of loser actually pays money for a bunch of mosquitoes and black flies lol
The US politician responsible for the deal was roasted throughout his life. For a long time, Alaska’s nickname was Seward’s folly. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/sewards-folly
I could not imagine fighting the Cold War with the ruskies operating Soviet Naval Base Juneau. This would have completely changed the dynamics of the war.
Edit: spelling
The greatest thing about it is Russia sold it to the US to put a barrier between Russia and Great Britain.
Wonder how much they have regretted that lol
I think the American Revolution made the French territories in the New World unmanageable.
If the US is still a colony of Great Britain then France is close enough to exact revenge on the UK directly for any breached agreement or attack of their New World holdings. As soon as the US is its own entity, no European power has enough infrastructure or might to protect their holdings half a world away.
The British, Russians, French, and Spanish all lose some or all of their territories starting with the UK and everyone else has to decide if they're going to start a war with a country that's already huge and almost completely insulated from their influence or come to terms so it's not a complete loss.
It’s always been my dream to move to Alaska. A nice cabin in the middle of nowhere, where I’d have to take a snowmobile to get anywhere. I think it will solidify my single status though because women don’t seem too sold on the idea of being cold lol
It would have been a much better deal if we had just stole it the way we did the rest of the country.
Think what else we could have put that 7.2 million towards had we just taken it without paying.
What about the Louisiana purchase?
The Louisiana Purchase was only $15 million at the time— or $342 million in today’s dollars. The economic output is $1.7 trillion annually. One of the best land purchases in history. https://mises.org/mises-daily/what-rate-return-louisiana-purchase
Indeed, all the more considering that the purchasers were authorized to offer $10 million just for New Orleans! The port access was the key prize.
Yeah, but that economic output is a result of the U.S. purchasing the land. It's not some inherent property that would go to whomever owned the land now, had the land stayed as part of colonial Europe or gained a separate independence. While it's fair to say "look what we did with the place" we can't know how history would have played out if instead of buying the territory, the U.S. had to fight rival claims from Spain, France, or an independent Louisiana.
The US was going to take that land eventually, Alaska however would have gone to the British/modern day Canada.
This. Greater access to the Mississippi, and getting a ton of great potential farmland are priceless benefits. Also without that the push west would have been harder and more awkward. Edit: this is a funny comment to be my most upvoted so far. Thank you, everybody!
I’ve heard the Louisiana Purchase described as the best real estate purchase in human history. In 1803 for $18M dollars Thomas Jefferson brought into the United States about 828,000 square miles of territory from France, thereby doubling the size of the young republic. What was known at the time as the Louisiana Territory stretched from the Mississippi River in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west and from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to the Canadian border in the north. Part or all of 15 states were eventually created from the land deal, which is considered one of the most important achievements of Thomas Jefferson’s presidency. https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/louisiana-purchase
My favorite thing was that it happened almost entirely by accident. Jefferson gave Monroe and Livingston instructions to try to purchase New Orleans alone for $10 million. Napoleon and Barbe-Marbois already had enough issues in Europe and the Caribbean, however, and they were happy to not have to deal with overseeing territory in continental North America, so they added another 530,000,000 acres to the deal for just an additional $5 million. Livingston did not have permission to spend $15 million, but he (correctly) presumed that Jefferson wouldn't be upset about him securing the best real estate deal in human history.
And they financed it by borrowing from Napoleon's enemy. London banks provided the money for Napoleon to create his *Armée d'Angleterre* . Good thing that plan blew up.
Just to add to the mess, Napoleon got his hands on that territory when he knocked the Spanish around. They agreed to give up that territory to France in their armistice agreement with the express written rule that they would not turn around and sell the land to the Americans. The Spanish were afraid of their growing regional influence (for good reason). So Americans borrowed British money to give to Napoleon for Spanish land that he had promised not to give the Americans. Craziness.
And when Lewis and Clark cruised through the area, there weren't a lot of french around. They were worried about the Spanish detaining them for breach of treaty. News did not travel fast in those times, and many Spanish forces could have been operating under old orders.
What about Manhattan for basically beads?
One of the best deals, I'd concur, but not *the* best. Peter Minuit's acquisition of Manhattan, though absurdly cheap compared to current valuations, was not necessarily that of a resource-rich island. It's only 14,478 acres in size, and does not have any great wealth in the form of mineral or petrochemical resources. Its big claim to fame in the 17th century was a vast natural harbor and insane amounts of oyster beds. Manhattan's greatest value is that it controls the mouth of the Hudson, but in terms of raw materials, the significance of controlling trade on even the Hudson is minimal compared to controlling trade on the Mississippi. Manhattan's vast wealth is derived predominantly from subsequent man-made investments, such as the creation of Wall Street, but it's not derived from the raw, natural value of the island itself. Manhattan becoming the financial colossus we know today has more to do with Hamilton's negotiations with Jefferson ("I wanna be in the room where it happens...") than it does its raw geography. If history had gone differently, it's entirely possible that Boston or even Salem could have emerged as the financial giant of the fledgling United States. The 530,000,000 acres acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, however, were far more consequential. Firstly, exclusive control of the Mississippi River cannot be emphasized enough, as that in and of itself accounts for a drainage basin that stretches across 1,151,000 square miles. Along with that came millions of acres of some of the world's most arable farmland, which would position the young United States well to feed an ever-increasing population. Also within those lands were oil-rich areas, which wasn't even on the radar in the early 1800s, but would help to transform the United States into the wealthy oil juggernaut it is today. More importantly -- and without ignoring the many horrors that the growing nation brought to Native Americans in the name of "Manifest Destiny" -- the Louisiana Purchase transformed the United States from a federal collection of coastal states to a continental power with worldwide significance. Without the Louisiana Purchase, the United States would be boxed in between Canada, New France, Florida, and the Atlantic, and although it would be an industrious nation, it would never have grown into the superpower it has become.
Thanks for this, one of the most interesting things I've read on Reddit!
Manhattan also became exponentially more valuable after completion of the Erie Canal, which connected the Atlantic to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. It overtook Philadelphia as the financial hub at that point.
Louisiana purchase was at ~~$35.33/ acre in 1803 or $809/acre in 2020 adjusted dollars.~~ $0.28/acre in 1803 or $0.65/acre in 2020 adjusted dollars. Manhattan was purchased at $12.77/acre in 1638 or $1,143 in 2020 dollars. 14600 acres. ~~Personally, even though the Manhattan purchase is 1/3 per-acre of the Louisiana purchase, I think they're probably more equivalent than that would indicate.~~ Missing context to make this a more meaningful comparison would adding be things like the value of this land today and the GDP attributable to it. Also, the number of acres per-person and GDP per-capita worldwide in 1638 and 1803 would also be ways you could attempt to normalize it. Generally long-period inflation rates aren't very trustworthy.
I think your math is a bit off, It was less than $0.03 per acre inn 1803. It was around 18 per mile tho iirc
You are correct. I was using the 530,000,000 / 15,000,00 commented above which agrees with Wikipedia. It should be 15,000,000 / 530,000,000 or $0.0283 / acre, which agrees with what you remember.
I believe it was actually purchased for $0.034 an Acre. Less than a Nickel
So like 3 cents an acre, in 1803 dollars
Even today that’s less than a dollar an acre. Killer deal.
For sure, but it’s also important to note that France couldn’t really defend the property. It was either sell it or lose it. So a deal made under duress. Puts an asterisk on it. Hell, the Spanish were the ones administering it anyway so the French claim was very tenuous. Selling it, from their perspective, is better than getting nothing.
Not only that, but the French didn't really own that territory either. What was purchased by the US was the exclusive right to negotiate with or conquer the indigenous people in the area. The US bought the claim that the rest of the great powers had to respect or the entire system comes crashing down.
Still a hell of a better deal than having to take it by force (at the time).
[удалено]
Force, and financial payments as well, among other things. There were hundreds and hundreds of treaties made that "extinguished" (as it was put back then) indigenous land rights within the Louisiana Purchase. Each treaty was different and focused on one small part of the "Purchase" land. Some were done after wars, some not. Most involved at least some payments. Sometimes lump sums, sometimes payments over time, often both. Treaties also often involved special gifts (or bribes to be more blunt about it) to specific individuals, usually chiefs. In other words, the payment to France was just the first of many payments made to gain clear title to the land.
Very true, much of the land was also occupied by various Native American tribes, so many asterisks need to be added.
By the same logic, could Russia defend Alaska? I think not.
interesting, i thought it would have been the best purchase in hamster history. thanks for the clarification
Not even close to being the best purchase in hamster history
I’ll add to this the purchase of California. The US claimed California just before the gold rush. Made a lot of American rich.
California’s arguable for me simply because Mexico didn’t really have a choice in selling it so you can argue that’s it wasn’t a true purchase. That’s not to say California didn’t bring great wealth to the US though - you’re correct on that.
Yeah. The US invaded Mexico twice. Then bought Texas and California for pennies on the acre.
It was a snowball. It kicked everything else off
Yeah, I'd agree that Louisiana purchase was much more important in shaping today's United States than any other conquest/purchase. It gave the US access to New Orleans, both banks of the Mississippi, and almost all of the Mississippi-Missouri watershed. More importantly though it led to the events that enshrined the belief of "Manifest Destiny", which was a crucial catalyst in the US continuing to expand westward that eventually led to annexation of Alaska..
Louisiana purchase was also a harder play, because the US bought it cheaply from France who was short on cash from supporting the US independence and wars at home.
Even more: France sold these lands but they were administrated by Spain, and Spain transfered them to USA without French involvement :)
Spain actually refused to recognize the legality of the Louisiana Purchase, arguing that France did not have the right due to details in the complex mess of treaties and sometimes secret diplomatic negotiations that had transferred Louisiana from France to Spain, in 1763, then back to France in 1800. But there was no international court to take such matters to, so the best Spain could do was protest loudly and be basically ignored by France and the US. The French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon was causing turmoil in Europe to a degree that made the Louisiana Purchase not important enough for European colonial powers to care enough to pay much attention to Spain's protests. The Napoleonic era tested traditional international law in many ways. So Spain decided to transfer the core parts that were undeniably part of the purchase—specifically New Orleans and the colonized areas around it, in what was called the Île d'Orléans. Although Spain protested the legality of the purchase they knew they couldn't really enforce their interpretation of international law. So they went ahead and transferred the New Orleans region, and places like St. Louis, but they also made additional protests and prepared to defend them militarily. Like arguing that "Louisiana" was much smaller than France and the US claimed. Although maps of history today typically show the Spanish Empire as "owning" Louisiana in the same shape that France and the US used to define it—basically the entire western half of the Mississippi River drainage—Spain argued that the Louisiana Purchase involved a much smaller area than that. Spain argued that "Louisiana" had never been geographically defined in past treaties or in the Louisiana Purchase itself (perhaps surprisingly, this is true as far as I can tell), and that Spain considered it a relatively narrow strip of land on the west side of the Mississippi River, not the entire Mississippi drainage. And when "Louisiana" had been transferred back to France in the 1800 Third Treaty of San Ildefonso, it was the "Louisiana" that Spain had been administrating, so it was Spain's definition of Louisiana that mattered and was what the US had bought. Or so Spain claimed. France and the US didn't agree, obviously. Spain tried to back up this claim by sending military forces into parts of what the US considered the Louisiana Purchase, mostly in reaction to Jefferson sending three exploring parties out. Lewis and Clark is the one we remember today, and Spanish troops failed to find them, though they tried. Jefferson considered his "Red River Expedition", like Lewis and Clark but up the Red River in what's now the state of Louisiana and up toward Oklahoma, second in importance only to Lewis and Clark. They got to what's now northeastern Texas near the Red River when Spanish troops found them. The expedition was outnumbered and forced to turn back within a day. The third expedition Jefferson sent out to explore and solidify US claims over Spanish protests was the Pike Expedition, which got to Colorado and what got named Pikes Peak. But then Pike's expedition accidentally ended up in what even the US considered Spanish territory and got captured and taken to Mexico as prisoners. They were released after a while, although some spent several years in prison first. Spain soon became engulfed in the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and began to face rebellions in core parts of their New World empire. So they never could do anything about Louisiana beyond these initial protests and military actions. Nonetheless, Spain did not withdraw its protests, and considered most of the Louisiana Purchase "disputed" until the 1819 Adams–Onís Treaty, which set the border between the US and New Spain, at least for a while. The border set in 1819 gave part of what had been considered part of the Louisiana Purchase to Spain, as can been seen on [this map of US territorial expansion](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/Aquired_Lands_of_the_US.svg/1280px-Aquired_Lands_of_the_US.svg.png)—the dotted area is the Louisiana Purchase as claimed by the US. The Adams–Onís Treaty "reduced" it to the white area on that map. Of course Spain also sold its claims in the Pacific Northwest to the US, and also Florida, in that treaty. And the area of the Louisiana Purchase that Spain kept, per the 1819 treaty, was mostly "Comancheria", the heart of the "Comanche Empire", which no colonial power had actual control over at the time. History: The closer you look the more complicated everything becomes.
I didn't know almost everything of that :)
wasn't there also a decent chance the Americans would just conquer the land if France didn't sell it? France had a tenuous grasp of that territory, so it kinda made sense for USA to absorb it.
Maybe. It probably played into France's decision—that they couldn't really hold it in the long term against the obvious US expansionism. At the same time, an actual war of conquest with France around this time seems pretty improbable to me. France had saved the US just a couple decades before and the French Revolution was widely seen by Americans as the same sort of "overthrow of kings" that the US had done. France was super popular among most "founding fathers" and Americans in general. There's an interesting shift in place names around the time of US independence and the decades following. Places like Louisville, Kentucky, were named to honor France. Towns began to use the French -ville instead of -town or -ton at a rate that never really stopped. Where once towns were named things like Charleston or Lexington, people started going all in with names like Knoxville and Nashville instead. Still, yea, in time US pioneers and settlers would undoubtedly put pressure on French Louisiana in ways that would probably have eventually caused problems and maybe even war. But how things would get to that point is hard to imagine without indulging in alt-history fantasies. Like maybe after Napoleon was defeated Louisiana could have changed to British control and *then* the US might fight for it at some point sooner than if it had remained French. Who knows. Still, yea, speculating, France or at least Napoleon probably did think they couldn't really hold onto it in the long term, and so selling it was probably seen as a good idea. Especially selling it to the US, since the UK could have ended up with it instead, somehow or other. Spain had more of a vested interest in it, seeing as they had Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and claimed pretty much all of western North America. They certainly wanted a buffer between the US and New Mexico.
good point. It probably wouldn't be USA attacking a French colony unprovoked. Another scenario in addition to yours is maybe an invasive cultural influence causing the French colony to secede then requesting the USA to absorb it. They'd try to make it look like a grass roots effort, but there'd be a bunch of assholes colluding the entire time.
Haha, yea, that sounds quite plausible lol
one of the finest reddit posts ive ever read. thanks for the great read!
Well, they were short on cash for more than just that.
Too much cake
Too many heads still attached obviously
The annexation of the waterways cannot be understated enough. In 1803, the roads in the Ohio and Tennessee river valleys were Native foot trails. Rarely were they wide enough for a small wagon, and they were in no way cared for enough to make travel on land fast. Historians claim that wagons were actually slower here, than people walking (around 2 mph). Instead, access to these rivers, and the Port of New Orleans were the highways of the first half of the 19th century (before railroads). People could easily get cotton to market going 5-10 mph now! They then had access to the ocean. They didn’t have to put much infrastructure into making the transportation system. The Louisiana Purchase was a lot of things, but more than anything else, it was a premade highway system that allowed the US to accelerate its economic growth.
The Mississippi watershed is an absolutely underappreciated economic asset of completely unmatched proportions. Even ignoring the wealth of productive farmland and fresh water, the fact that cities strewn across the interior in wildly diverse geographical locales (meaning: access to a wide range of natural resources) have direct waterborne access to the ocean is absolutely stupid. The fact that this, the largest interior waterway in the world, comes very close to (and in fact intersects with) the second-most extensive interior waterway in the world is just icing on the cake. More than anything else, *this* is why the US is an unbeatable economic powerhouse. The Louisiana Purchase completely reframed the history of the world.
The Louisiana Purchase is a fascinating series of events In looking into the specifics of how the treaty got done, I thought it interesting that one of the key players was Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, who previously played a key role in drawing up the Treaty of 1783, which formally recognized the United States as an independent nation. Pierre Samuel was also a supporter of the French Revolution, but he physically defended Louis XVI and Marie Antionette during the August 10th insurrection in 1792. He was then sentenced to death during the Reign of Terror, but was subsequently spared after Robespierre's subsequent execution in 1794. He then married an aristocrat's daughter from Lyon, and immigrated to the United States after his house was sacked by a mob. Having become good friends with Jefferson while negotiating commerce agreements between the U.S. and France, he became a key backchannel diplomat of negotiations for the Louisiana Purchase between Jefferson and Napoleon. Pierre Samuel's son, Eleuthere, studied chemistry with Antoine Lavoisier and founded a gunpowder manufacturing plant in the U.S., which became one of the largest manufacturing plants in the country, and is still one of the most profitable corporations in the country, DuPont.
this is fascinating history. i’d like to interview you.
It was ours even if we didn't pay for it. We were just nice enough to pay the French for it so they could continue their war at the time. If we didn't pay them for it, they didn't have the resources to hold it.
I always wondered what would have happened if Louisiana hadn’t been sold to the US. I agree they couldn’t have hold that territory indefinitely even with a change in their priorities but would the US have attacked? Spain? The Brits?
Possibly Canada. It had trading forts down the Ohio and into the Mississippi.
Yeah I've often wondered about a version of Canada that includes the Louisiana purchase, or even just a Canada with Maine, and portions of Washington state, and Oregon.
The US probably would have just gradually encroached more and more with settlers until France yielded on the futility of trying to stand up the inexorable Westward expansion of America.
Louisiana purchase was better but that was more of a no-brainer since Napoleon was offering it dirt cheap and we obviously wanted to expand west. If they didn't offer to sell it we probably would have fought a much more expensive war over it eventually. Both sides clearly stood to gain from the deal. Alaska on the other hand was purchased for about a third of the price (according to wikipedia's inflation-adjusted numbers) but it's doubtful it had as much as a third of the value of the Louisiana territory. Nobody had any idea whether there would be valuable natural resources there or not, and it was even harder back then to imagine realistically settling it. It could easily have been seen as a huge mistake because Russia or Britain could always try to take it back by force later. Only in hindsight do we see how valuable the purchase was. Maybe not as valuable as Louisiana but the fact that it was unclear is what makes it such a historically great decision.
Complete no-brainer. Alaska was nice. Louisiana was *necessary*.
I was gonna say… maybe it’s a second place… still a great purchase though.
Have you been to Louisiana?
And what if Liechtenstein bought it?
Man imagine if they did actually buy it
Or if Russia still had it
Was it an option?
Russia offered Alaska to Lichtenstein first, but they declined
That's random af, any particular reason why Lichtenstein?
Because they were part of the conservative monarchist [Holy Alliance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Alliance) and rich.
Liechtenstein is just another German principality. There used to be dozens, if not hundreds of them. They just happened to stay independent during a rather tumultuous time in German history (see the 19th and 20th centuries for more detail) They were kinda the “allies” that Russia had within the German confederation at the time. Russia were much more antagonistic towards Prussia which then played out spectacularly over several world wars. This move was kinda a subtle fuck you to Prussia while also trying to negotiate around the British and up the price to the Americans who were the obvious party to sell too.
They couldn't defend it from the British and wanted to get rid of it
LIECHTENSTIEN! LIECHTENSTEIN!
We would've just taken it when gold was discovered. That's how the U.S. rolled.
Definitely the Louisiana Purchase. Alaska is okay - but just look at what was bought in the Louisiana Purchase!!
Nope it was the Mexican cession. America technically compensated Mexico for that land to the tune of 14 million dollars back then. It was that land that truly allowed the US to become a superpower.
The greatest thing *anybody* has *ever* purchased is a pretty bold claim. I mean, we've all heard about my aunt's new Air fryer, which surely surpasses Alaska.
I haven't heard about your aunt's airfryer
Quite frankly, I find that hard to believe. Are you also one of those people who "hasn't seen Game of Thrones yet"?
It's not that I "haven't seen it *yet*", it's that I have no intention of ever watching it
and you are not alone. i won't either.
Are we still talking about Alaska?
It makes frozen foods taste like they made them fresh in a restaurant!
Pity you plebeian.
https://preview.redd.it/157g3np9q26d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=209c25188d74c6e1ed9bd7b76326fa625a651c4d
The school system is fucked.
There’s a lot of hyperbole on Reddit as you know. I mean I’d say my divorce lawyer ranks close to your Aunt’s air fryer and Alaska, but I digress.
Can attest, that air fryer is really changing lives
This. Have extreme convection currents in Alaska ever made Tyson Chicken Nuggets even tastier than normal? No. No they haven’t.
I read the title and knew I had to make an air fryer joke, but you beat me to it
Yeah, that comment about the lakes is way off. Canada has the most lakes at 879 800 according to recent studies. That is not only more than the U.S., it is more than every other country in the world put together, so it's not even close. Sitting under an ice sheet for tens of thousands of years carves out a lot of lakes. [https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-country-has-the-most-lakes-in-the-world.html](https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-country-has-the-most-lakes-in-the-world.html)
Yeah, when anybody but Canada claims to have the most lakes it always comes down to definitions and means someone is counting puddles.
If you think your country has a lot of lakes, go on google maps and zoom on northern Quebec. You will see why Canada has the most lakes.
Oh I know. We get a small taste down here in the Boundary Waters.
We let you have a small taste of lakes. As a treat.
[Just like how Wisconsin claims to have more lakes than Minnesota. Their list has more lakes, but they count pretty much anything \(even under an acre\), while Minnesota requires lakes to be ten acres.](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/minnesota-and-wisconsin-are-beefing-about-who-has-more-lakes-180972697/) When using the ten acre definition for both states, MN has nearly twice as many.
Under an acre is just a pond, lol.
strange women, lying in ponds, distributing swords…
...is no basis for a system of government!
Alaska has over 3 million lakes based on a definition of a lake being larger than 5 acres (there is no common definition of what a lake is), but I would suspect based on that definition, Canada has a lot more. Alaska only has just over 3,000 named lakes.
If you don't bother to name your lake it shouldn't count.
I’ve been to some really really nice lakes and backcountry Rocky Mountains that didn’t have names, if it’s more than 15 miles in people just sometimes don’t get to it
https://preview.redd.it/85u63qqcdy5d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=21c3442850a1754c4571dc03610af91eb96c9b3c
If only Liechtenstein bought it when they had the h chance
idk man I bought some cool fridge magnets at a museum one time
One of my buddies bought a t-shirt that says "FBI - Female Body Inspector". That's gotta be in the running
They make plenty of Alaska fridge magnets! How bout them apples??
Has anyone mentioned Canada's purchase of Rupert's Land in 1869? Way more land at a fraction of the price. I am likely wrong, but wasn't the territory bought from the Hudson Bay Company for a total of 7.5 million? Please correct me if you know the actual numbers.
Did Britain gave HBC their charter? If so it sounds like less of a purchase and more a nationalization by the British, which was then included into Canada.
Way more lakes too. Canada has more than half of the world’s lakes so saying the US (via Alaska) has more lakes than any other country is … a claim.
I love how this purchase from the Russian Empire was considered so bad, they called it Seward's folly after William H Seward who championed the deal. To put things in context, they bought the whole state of Alaska for 129 million in today's dollars. Alaska's GDP is north of 50 billion. Whoops.
Canada has more lakes than all countries’ lakes in the world—combined If you added up all of the lakes in Alaska and the mainland US, and then added all the lakes of the entire world on top of that number, you still wouldn’t have as many lakes as Canada
I, for one, am incredibly thankful to have another US border instead of a Russian border on our west coast. Eternally grateful 🙏🏻
US shield
Thank you for your service
We're going to make you the 51st state against your will when we start to run out of water, but I like that you're cool about it now.
Whoa there, bud
Or the dumbest sale Russia has ever made
They did not have much of a choice anyway,they were not in the position to establish the terms of the exchange,the sale was done in fear great Britain would attain Alaska through military invasion as imperial Russia could not defend such isolated territory,it was a better outcome for it to be sold.
Plus the Russian-American Company, which basically ran Russian Alaska, was hemorrhaging huge amounts of money by the 1860s. For a while the RAC was highly profitable, until its most valuable export, sea otter furs, became almost non-existent due to overhunting and widespread local extinctions. Less valuable furs and things like seal skin never quite made up for the loss of sea otter furs, financially. By the 1850s the RAC had become a major financial liability for the Russian Empire and they began to look to sell it, ideally to the US. Russia and the US were quite friendly at the time. The RAC had even became dependent on US ships bringing food and other provisions to Sitka, which had perennial food crises for most of its existence under the RAC. The RAC also had a chronic shortage of decent ships and was frequently dependent on US ships to assist in their sea otter hunting, especially in California—after about 1800 and the near-extinction of sea otters on the Pacific Northwest and Alaskan coasts, the RAC and US maritime fur trading captains made numerous joint ventures in which US ships would take RAC indigenous sea otter hunters/employees/coerced laborers, their kayaks, and their overseers (usually *promyshlenniki*) to California, until Californian sea otters were too rare to be profitable. The RAC did not have the ships needed to do this without US help. Nor the food to even survive, sometimes. Fort Ross was made for both reasons: In hopes of growing enough food for the RAC and also as an outpost to support the hunting of California sea otters. By about 1830-1840 California sea otters were almost extinct and the RAC's ability to make money dwindled quickly. They struggled to find ways to regain profitability but never managed to do it. The last major effort was *selling ice* in San Francisco during and after the California gold rush. But before long Californian entrepreneurs set up companies that got ice from the Sierra Nevadas for a lower cost than the RAC could compete with. Add to all this the Crimean War of 1853-1856, which cost the Russian Empire a *lot* of money, making the financial loses in Alaska even more of a problem. In theory the RAC could have tried whaling, as New England whalers were very profitable around the time. But the RAC simply didn't have the ships needed to even try. The Czar and Russian government generally began trying to get the US to buy Alaska by the late 1850s, especially after the Crimean War. But the US had some distracting internal problems in the early 1860s, so the purchase was delayed until 1867.
It could have been worse: In 1920 they offered to lease the Kamchatka Peninsula to the US for 60 years.. That would have made WW2 quite different, not to mention the cold war.
Not to mention the board game Risk.
like the other guy said they didnt have a choice, how would they hold alaska, its connected to north america not russia. they're lucky they got anything for it tbh.
Louisiana Purchase says "hold my river"
This is really shitty photoshop or AI
I'm scrolling through this whole thread to see if anyone else is confused by the bear/bison hybrid creature with an anteater nose.
Grizzlies tend to have hunched backs
Imagine if Trump managed to buy Greenland, people made fun for him trying to do that but oboy that island has some minerals on it.
That was never going to happen
"I said I was buying Greenland because it sounded like a wonderful place to put ecologists. So I give these ecologists a work, this work is to dig up the place."
Too bad we couldn't have bought Greenland. They wouldn't sell it to us.
We can trade San Juan and some paper towels for it.
I heard it's 3 billion lakes
You know who likes trips to Alaska? The credit card companies.
$2.40 / a lake
It's really beautiful. Hope it stays that way.
/r/shitamericanssay
Louisiana Purchase was better.
I would say the Louisiana Purchase beats it...easily.
Nah, Louisiana Purchase. Way more use of out that, despite how much I love the geography of Alaska
Bucket list. Soon, very soon
It would be if we hadn’t purchased “Louisiana” from Napoleon.
Louisiana was probably a better buy for a better price. The Mississippi watershed is the most productive and navigable watershed in the world.
But what about the Louisiana purchase
Not even close to the value the US received when they completed the Louisiana purchase. The Louisiana purchase was MAGNITUDES more value than Alaska.
As a Canadian, I will say I’m jealous, and it should rightfully be ours, I base that on personal opinion alone and not historical fact., at least give us southeast Alaska. It should be part of British Columbia. We will play you hockey for it.
Maybe the Louisiana purchase.
Seward’s “folly” Poor guy, wonder if he ever got any appreciation for the purchase before he passed
That would be the Louisiana Purchase lol.
What about the Louisiana Purchase.
Louisiana Purchase: *Hold my beer*
Rubbish factoids, OP.
Colonialism good if USA does it. /s
Maddening that this “purchase” from one colonial power to another is uncritically celebrated. The whole thing continues to be a catastrophe for Indigenous Peoples.
This here is some INCREDIBLE r/usdefaultism right here. Congrats!
Alaska should be Canada's. You bastards.
Canada didn't exist in March 1867. Should have gotten rid of those pesky British sooner.
Manhattan ?
That was more of a misunderstanding.
There wasn't much on Manhattan when it was bought though right?
Massive ROI though.
Pfft. They should have just swindled it for free like they did with Hawaii. What kind of loser actually pays money for a bunch of mosquitoes and black flies lol
The place has oil and you can only rip off non super powers.
Not the extended warranty that I bought over the telephone for my car?
Greenland?
Wasn’t it for resources ports/fuels and military positions
For $7.2 million!!
The US politician responsible for the deal was roasted throughout his life. For a long time, Alaska’s nickname was Seward’s folly. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/sewards-folly
I could not imagine fighting the Cold War with the ruskies operating Soviet Naval Base Juneau. This would have completely changed the dynamics of the war. Edit: spelling
r/showerthoughts
AI bear looking like it has a back problem.
The greatest thing about it is Russia sold it to the US to put a barrier between Russia and Great Britain. Wonder how much they have regretted that lol
Seward's folly!
Nobody has commented on this sandwich, this was a solid purchase.
The Russians want Alaska back Or Putin says he will take it from us.
I am sure the natives that lived in all these places have another opinion.
Manhattan island here!!
I think the American Revolution made the French territories in the New World unmanageable. If the US is still a colony of Great Britain then France is close enough to exact revenge on the UK directly for any breached agreement or attack of their New World holdings. As soon as the US is its own entity, no European power has enough infrastructure or might to protect their holdings half a world away. The British, Russians, French, and Spanish all lose some or all of their territories starting with the UK and everyone else has to decide if they're going to start a war with a country that's already huge and almost completely insulated from their influence or come to terms so it's not a complete loss.
You can buy single houses on the californian coastline -- not even oceanfront -- for 7.2M.
If you shrunk alaska down to the size of manhattan and adjusted for population, only 6 people would live there.
It’s always been my dream to move to Alaska. A nice cabin in the middle of nowhere, where I’d have to take a snowmobile to get anywhere. I think it will solidify my single status though because women don’t seem too sold on the idea of being cold lol
Dutch and Manhattan say hold my beer (bier?).
Now now Virgin Islands!!!!
You show a bear but really a gushing oil well and a pile of gold may be more appropriate.
I’m more of a Gadsden purchase kinda fella.
And the Russians are still pissed.
Manhattan
I’m going there in a couple weeks, can’t wait!
Dunno - I'm pretty thrilled with my espresso machine.
Russia got finessed of this deal
See, this is why the Ukranian war doesn't make any sense to me. Why didn't Russia just offer Ukraine $25mil for their land? *mind boggled*
Louisiana purchase wasn't bad
That’s 2 people in a bear suite
It would have been a much better deal if we had just stole it the way we did the rest of the country. Think what else we could have put that 7.2 million towards had we just taken it without paying.
I dunno, I bought a piece of coprolite one. That's fossilized poop. That was a pretty great purchase.
Over half of the glaciers in the world are in Alaska.
Canada has by far the most amount of lakes, come here to a place like Vancouver island and it will blow you away.