This week we’ll be marking the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jamestown in Virginia. Even the Queen has come to celebrate. Nobody told her that Virginia doesn’t belong to her any more. Jamestown was the first successful English settlement on this continent. It’s founding will be celebrated as a glorious event, like the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth Rock. But a revealing new book, Savage Kingdom, by Benjamin Wooley, paints a less than glorious picture. He describes how, in 1607, “A rag bag of mediocrities, led by a one-armed ex-pirate, an epileptic aristocrat, and a disgraced cleric, set up an outpost on the James River in Virginia,” and set about exploiting the land and its people in the time-honored style of conquerors throughout the ages.

The settlers prevailed, in spite of dreadful hardships. Five years after the landing, colonist John Rolfe had contrived to grow and export tobacco, thus launching a health catastrophe that still continues, and assured his place in American mythology by marrying the Indian Princess Pocahontas. By the time the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock, Jamestown was solidly established, and even had a crude version of democratic government.

So the ragged band of English adventurers became founding fathers and heroes, with the passage of time, and their descendants became Americans. By the strange alchemy of nationalism the British settlement of Jamestown was transformed into a foreign place that British people cannot visit without a passport.

In 1607 there was still plenty of almost-empty land waiting to be settled by anyone who could hold it. That’s how nations grow, by the settlement, conquest, or purchase of territory. But in 2007 there’s no empty land left to settle, which leaves only conquest or purchase. Purchase seems the most legitimate, and certainly the least violent method of nation building.

If we really want Iraq, for example, we should stop messing about and just buy it. The price should be at rock bottom right now. The Sunnis and the Shiites would all become Americans over night, and could settle their differences in the time-honored American way, by suing each other. There are plenty of historical precedents, notably Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase of 1803 in which millions of bemused Spaniards, Native Americans, Creoles and French suddenly found that the ground under their feet had been bought by the United States.

Unfortunately the acquisition of territory is a process that works both ways, as every empire builder in history has discovered. People tend to push back, former proprietors of the land try to re-assert their claims. The British, for example, might like to buy Jamestown back, and a lot more territory besides, but they can’t afford it.

But consider the Native Americans, who were living around Jamestown and all over the continent in 1607. They might like to get it all back too, and perhaps they can. Here’s the scheme. There are now almost three hundred Native American casinos in twenty-eight states, with combined profits of around twenty billion dollars. Each year the profits from gambling get bigger and bigger. The wealth of America, already compromised by a ruinous war, is flowing into these casinos like water running downhill.

Ever heard of a leveraged buyout? One day, not too far in the future, the tribes will put all their casino money together, and make us an offer we can’t refuse.