Wealth & Money Quote by James J. Hill

Hill’s line reads like a tycoon’s weather report: not a moral claim, not even quite a prediction, but a blunt assessment of where the money is going to fall. As a railroad empire-builder, he’s speaking from the vantage point of steel, timetables, and freight rates. “Review the commercial history” is a power move in itself, framing his worldview as empirical and inevitable, as if markets were geology and not policy. It’s also a salesman’s trick: if history “discovers” this truth, then Hill isn’t lobbying for a strategy so much as pointing to an obvious law smart people must obey.

The key term is “oriental trade,” a period label that compresses an enormous range of Asian economies into a single prize. The subtext is not curiosity about the East; it’s a map of extraction. “Controls” is the operative verb, suggesting that wealth doesn’t merely flow to those who participate, but to those who command chokepoints: ports, shipping lanes, rail corridors, finance, and the political leverage to keep all of it stable for investors.

Context matters. Hill’s career sits in the late-19th/early-20th century, when U.S. industrialists were fixated on transpacific commerce and China markets, and when “trade” often traveled alongside gunboats, unequal treaties, and racialized ideas about who gets to set the terms. The sentence is a compact rationale for infrastructure and expansion: build the lines, seize the routes, and global wealth follows. It’s cynically elegant, and it reveals a bigger truth about the era: capitalism’s most confident voices liked to present domination as destiny.