mech-eng said:
I mention about modern times which should be after 1700s. Before that time, some kind of events could take place in history.
Why after the 1700s? That seems a tad arbitrary.
Countries are not sold much nowadays because, like everything else, the prices are outrageously high (there are no more bargains to be had), and when you do pick up a used country on the cheap, it's usually been trashed by the previous owners, so you have to start over with investing a lot of time and money to fix it up. Also, even small countries nowadays are usually crammed to the gills with a resentful population, which must be managed, whereas in the old days, there might be a handful of trappers to deal with, who didn't give a hoot whose flag was raised over the countryside as long as no one bothered them.
Take Siberia, for instance. Why does it belong to Russia? Why not China, or Korea, or Mongolia? There aren't a lot of people who live there to care one way or another, because they are too busy freezing to give a hoot. The only reason Siberia belongs to Russia is because some Russians decided to go walking east from Moscow way back around the time of Ivan the Terrible, and they didn't stop walking until they reached Vladivostok.
There are Aleuts who live on both sides of the Bering Strait, who used to travel back and forth to visit one another's tribes, do a little hunting and fishing, and generally have a blast. The eastern Aleuts didn't care that Alaska belonged to the US and the western Aleuts weren't exactly in tune with what was going on in Moscow. They were two related groups of people hanging out and having a good time. That is, until the Ministry of No Fun back in Moscow heard about this fraternization and put a stop to it.
With all of the problems in the western part of the country, the Russians still patrol the Bering Strait to make sure that none of their Aleuts cross over to mingle with their cousins in Alaska. Why? Because to the Russians, if their czar hadn't decided to sell Alaska to William Seward, they might now be sitting in Alaska, and perhaps own a good deal more of the northwestern portion of North America, all the way down to California. A lot of this country was settled by Russians before it was settled by the British or the Americans, and that still rankles the Russians, because they sold it for a pittance (about $7 million at the time).
To take a more modern example, look at Germany. After the war, there was West Germany and East Germany, which both went their separate ways until about 1989. The previous owners needed cash, a lot of it and in a hurry, but they decided they didn't want to sell East Germany because they knew it wouldn't fetch much in terms of price, and it would probably take a long time to sell. In steps West Germany, which decided that they wanted to be reunited with their eastern cousins, so the West Germans said to the previous owners, 'We'll take over the notes, and you don't have to worry about managing this property anymore.' The previous owners said it's a deal and walked away. The West Germans thought they got a bargain, that is, until they started checking things over.
They found that East Germany originally had a Thousand Year Lease taken on it by a previous owner, who defaulted after 12 years, leaving the place in a shambles. The seller had come in and made a few cosmetic improvements, but generally had made no large investment in keeping the place modern, except for adding a lot of asbestos to fire-proof it. When the West Germans started poking around at their new acquisition, they were shocked at how dilapidated East Germany actually was beneath the surface. Twenty-five years later, the West Germans have poured almost $1 trillion into a place they picked up for nothing, and it looks like much more will be needed to fix it up completely.
The lesson here is, even though you can acquire a country for nothing down, you might have to make large and expensive renovations to it to bring it up to date in keeping with all the latest health and safety codes. Even after you do all this improvement, you still might not be able to put the country back on the market and re-coup anything like what you've put into the place.
The West Germans were suckered because they thought their eastern cousins would have maintained their country to the same high standards which they, the West Germans, had maintained in their own country, and the westerners were sadly disappointed to find that the easterners were just as resentful of them as they had been of their previous two landlords.
Another lesson to take: be careful doing business with strangers; be even more careful when doing business with your relatives.
