Over the long history of the industrialised world the endowment of natural resources has regularly been something of a double-edged sword.
While it has bestowed immense riches on nations across the globe, it has also delivered hollowed-out economies and governments foolishly building their nations based on commodity booms lasting forever.
In South America during the 1900s and early 1910s, one expression of the wealth bestowed upon nations such as Argentina, Chile, and Brazil was the purchase of Dreadnought battleships.
