I don’t really have a great answer to that, except that empirically in this specific case, Spain was indeed able to extract very large amounts of resources from America within a single generation. (The Spanish government directly spent very little on America; the flow of money was overwhelming towards Europe, to the point where it caused notable inflation in Spain and in Europe as a whole.) I don’t disagree that running a state is expensive, but I don’t see why the expense would necessarily be higher than the extracted resources?
OK, so maybe the idea is “Conquered territory has reified net production across however long a period → take all the net production and spend it on ships / horses / mercenaries”?
I expect that the administrative parts of states expand to be about as expensive as the resources they can get under their direct control. (Perhaps this is the dumb part, and ancient states regularly stored >90% of tax revenue as treasure?). Then, when you are making the state more expensive to run, you have less of a surplus. You also can’t really make the state do something different than it was before if you have low fidelity control. The state doing what it was doing before probably wasn’t helping you conquer more territory.
I don’t really have a great answer to that, except that empirically in this specific case, Spain was indeed able to extract very large amounts of resources from America within a single generation. (The Spanish government directly spent very little on America; the flow of money was overwhelming towards Europe, to the point where it caused notable inflation in Spain and in Europe as a whole.) I don’t disagree that running a state is expensive, but I don’t see why the expense would necessarily be higher than the extracted resources?
OK, so maybe the idea is “Conquered territory has reified net production across however long a period → take all the net production and spend it on ships / horses / mercenaries”?
I expect that the administrative parts of states expand to be about as expensive as the resources they can get under their direct control. (Perhaps this is the dumb part, and ancient states regularly stored >90% of tax revenue as treasure?). Then, when you are making the state more expensive to run, you have less of a surplus. You also can’t really make the state do something different than it was before if you have low fidelity control. The state doing what it was doing before probably wasn’t helping you conquer more territory.