In an era when most wealth comes in the form of financial securities rather than physical resources, wars of conquest would seem to be a losing proposition.
The Russian treatment of Ukrainian banks in Crimea suggests an answer: the conquest of physical territory can be leveraged to acquire financial assets, such as claims to revenue from car leases.
Meanwhile, their secular peers demonstrate their masculinity in counter-productive ways: through sexual conquest and physical domination.
With the economic pillars of masculine domination crumbling, sexual conquest and physical strength are all that is left to many men as ways to prove themselves to be "real" men.
Ruling at the height of Egypt's imperial era, he strove to maintain his father's conquests by physical and military skills.
An effective conquest takes place when physical appropriation of territory (annexation) is followed by "subjugation" (i.e., the legal process of transferring title).
All of which is accompanied by the efforts of its owner to lure one of his prior conquests over for some physical therapy.
Hitler's conquest of Euope, however, was a physical debunking of capitalism.
The British understandably try to forget that their empire was the fruit of military conquest and of brutal wars involving physical and cultural extermination.
In the pre-sexting era, of course, Mozart's Don Giovanni had to rely on more old-fashioned methods of conquest, like innocent moonlight serenades (and physical force).
