Quote Originally Posted by gaelic cowboy View Post
Pre-Colonial India has a massive all year round ice free coastline and Indian rivers flow through it's agricultural areas to bring goods to port.
And Russia has the mighty Volga flowing through its heartland and into the Caspian Sea for the lucrative trade with Iran.

China is a special case her problem is the interior is waay waay poorer than her coastline, this has historically fed instability kinda like a stone on a seesaw. Isolationism is a way to equalise the disparity and balance the seesaw, I'm not saying it's rational just what they did/do to an extent.
But the point is that you can get rich even as a dedicated landlubber.

Obviously it is to a certain extent.
Not really, especially since we had little to offer to one another: we didn't need their furs, and they didn't need our furs. Timber? No, plenty of that on both sides. Some agricultural produce from the Deep South, yes, but that's it really.