> Both slavery and territorial expansion by force were wealth builders. It’s mathematically impossible for American settlers as a group to have become wealthy

> Both slavery and territorial expansion by force were wealth builders. It’s mathematically impossible for American settlers as a group to have become wealthy by expropriating wealth from Indians. Individual Indians had almost nothing—they were hunter gatherers with a small number of subsistence farmers. Nor did they have much wealth in the aggregate—their population was quite small even pre-contact. The America population in the first census was almost 4 million, which is higher than most estimates of even the pre-contact north america population. A more populous society can’t become rich by expropriating wealth from a poor, less populous society. That’s just math. What actually happened is that the American settlers built a civilization that utilized the resources of the continent vastly more productively than the Indians had. That’s entirely different.