Ernst was not flattering them; it was simply a fact. Like the annual tribute the Song dynasty paid to the Khitans, if such a sum were given to a country the size of Korea, it would be an enormous source of income.
America's Marshall Plan and the Soviet Union's Warsaw Pact served much the same purpose. It was merely that the two countries had been so powerful at the time that they could lead a whole string of nations to prosperity.
The Far East Empire of the twenty-first century had used the same tactic to win over other nations, especially Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam and Africa. From this perspective, East Africa's current actions were merely the reverse version of the Far East Empire's, though both had fixed their sights on the South Seas as a springboard.
However, East Africa's strength was still limited. The only ones who had truly grown rich on East Africa's charity were the Zanzibar merchants, yet Zanzibar had been assimilated into East Africa itself, so this was not particularly apparent. If Zanzibar had still been an independent country, it would have been no different from Japan and South Korea.
This involved the issue of trade. If the United States had not opened global market channels to Japan, Japan's vaunted automobile industry would not merely have been unable to export to Europe and America—even gathering enough parts for assembly would have been difficult, given Japan's lack of domestic resources.
Thus, even when Japan had been the world's second-largest economy, it could only bow and scrape before the United States. Zanzibar was no different. Once it lost East Africa's mainland supply channels, its decline would come in the blink of an eye.
Before 1869, when the Suez Canal had not yet opened, Zanzibar, as an unavoidable