The Point Is...

 

People have always rewritten or spun history to suit their point of view, the discoverable facts taking a back seat.   Engaging, made-up stories live on forever -- Nero certainly didn't fiddle during the Great Fire of Rome and likely didn't set it, as the popular tale goes.  There was a great worldwide flood and sea level rise as the Ice Age ended, but the story of Noah doesn't really explain that very well. I have several late 19th century U.S. history books; the common theme is we're heroes and everyone else inconviently got in the way.  It took getting  to Guns, Germs and Steel to see why and how things happened.

I think most of it can be interpreted, beyond events triggered by fear and hate, by considering two related factors:  control of trade and resources, and the millennia-old quest for free or very cheap labor.  Julius Caesar enslaved about a million Gauls, Middle Easterners  raided Africa constantly for the same reason, children worked in deadly factories and coal mines, and we in the New World had that Atlantic trade in humans running for centuries.

You won't find it in the Iliad or most accounts, but the Trojan War was about control of the lucrative trade between the Aegean and the Black Seas.  The Romans were motivated to eliminate those great traders, the Phoenicians, from the Mediterranean and the silver mines of Spain and despite passionate Senatorial speeches obscuring this goal, that was the reason for the three Punic Wars.  Commerce was everything to the Carthaginians and they were willing to fight for it until their utter destruction. 

 We learn in school that the War of 1812 was ignited by the kidnapping of Americans to serve in the British Navy; that was an important, but not the only, part of the war's close relationship to the Napoleonic conflicts.  More importantly, for Great Britain's blockade of European trade to work, they had to stop American commerce from crossing the Atlantic to France.  Resources were in contention also, as Britain also wanted control over the Great Lakes to be under Canada.  

After Napoleon abdicated in April 1814,  four invasion forces were freed up to put an end to a war that did not need to be pursued any longer.  All failed to achieve their main goals, (as at Ft. McHenry and New Orleans) while support for continuation faded rapidly among governments and the mercantile class.  As for the territory issue, the Empire was not going to keep American expansion out of the Lakes anyway.

World trade pursued peacefully and in good faith has had much better results historically than going to war to seize power over wealth.  But I wonder what the eventual outcome will be from Nixon's (really big business') opening up of China.