France Sold Enough Land to Double the USA for $15 Million. Why?

The Louisiana Purchase explained: in 1803 France sold enough land to double the United States for $15 million, under 3 cents an acre. Why? Louisiana was never France's real prize. From La Salle's 1682 claim to a colony of only about 7,000 French settlers facing over a million British colonists, France never had the people to hold the land it named after a king who never saw it. The real money was Saint-Domingue — today's Haiti — producing, by one estimate, about two-fifths of the world's sugar. When Napoleon's army lost that colony to yellow fever and revolution, Louisiana lost its job as a breadbasket and buffer. So in 1803, facing war with Britain, Napoleon sold the entire territory to the United States for about $15 million, doubling the young nation's size overnight — land that more than twenty Indigenous nations already called home, and never consented to selling. 0:00 Intro 0:50 France Claims Louisiana 1:20 A Colony Too Thin 2:36 The Real Prize 3:09 Losing Haiti 3:51 Napoleon Decides to Sell 5:03 The Purchase Deal 5:53 The Unpaid Cost 7:40 What Haiti Paid 8:19 The Scorecard Subscribe to Rich Map Poor Map: one place at a time, and what its map has to do with its money. #LouisianaPurchase #Economy #History