When countries paid cash for land.
Most borders moved because of wars. Some moved because somebody opened a chequebook. Here are the biggest land purchases in history, and two famous deals that are often told the wrong way round.
The short version, from my channel. Watch it on YouTube.
Correction: in the video I said Japan paid China for Taiwan. It was the other way round: China handed Taiwan to Japan and paid Japan as well. The details are below.
The big purchases
Louisiana, 1803. The United States paid France $15 million for the Louisiana Territory, about 828,000 square miles west of the Mississippi. It roughly doubled the size of the country. Napoleon, short of money and about to go back to war with Britain, sold the lot.
The Gadsden Purchase, 1854. $10 million to Mexico for a strip of land in what is now southern Arizona and New Mexico, wanted for a railway route to the Pacific.
Alaska, 1867. $7.2 million to Russia. Critics called it a waste of money; then came gold, and later oil.
The Virgin Islands, 1917. $25 million in gold to Denmark for the Danish West Indies, bought during the First World War to keep them out of German hands.
Colombia, 1921. Not a purchase exactly. Panama broke away from Colombia in 1903 with American support, and the US built the Panama Canal. Under the Thomson-Urrutia Treaty, ratified in 1921, the US paid Colombia $25 million to settle the matter.
Two deals told the wrong way round
Nice and Savoy, 1860. France did not buy them. In the Treaty of Turin, the Kingdom of Sardinia handed Nice and Savoy to France as the price for French help against Austria and for France accepting Sardinia's gains in central Italy. The treaty only set up commissions to work out incidental questions, such as how much of Sardinia's public debt went with the two regions.
Taiwan, 1895. After losing the First Sino-Japanese War, China signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki. It ceded Taiwan, the Penghu Islands and the Liaodong Peninsula to Japan, and on top of that China paid Japan a war indemnity of 200 million taels of silver. The money went from the loser to the winner, together with the land.
- 1803 Louisiana: $15 million to France
- 1854 Gadsden Purchase: $10 million to Mexico
- 1867 Alaska: $7.2 million to Russia
- 1917 Virgin Islands: $25 million in gold to Denmark
- 1921 $25 million to Colombia over Panama
Sources
- Louisiana Purchase, 1803, US Department of State, Office of the Historian
- Gadsden Purchase, 1853–1854, Office of the Historian
- Purchase of Alaska, 1867, Office of the Historian
- Treaty of the Danish West Indies, Wikipedia
- Thomson–Urrutia Treaty, Wikipedia
- Treaty of Turin (1860), Wikipedia
- Treaty of peace between Japan and China, 1895, Foreign Relations of the United States