I've often thought the joule is the only logical basis of wealth transfer.

Historically from recent to past, the US started mining and refining oil and gas, as an alternative to whale oil, which gave them a jump on the coal-based british empire, which came out of a Europe that had been happily chopping down and burning its forests for the previous millenia. The technology behind today's energy (burning fossil fuels) is the heir to those pre-historic agriculturalists that decided it was more efficient to stay in one place, chop down the trees and have storeable food energy on site that their itinerant food-foraging ancestors who lived in the supermarket of nature. Each way of living that superceded the next, have been based on energy access and use, and the energy that goes into acquiring that energy has been trending exponentially downward.

Nuclear fusion will provide the world with essentially limitless energy, starting in the next ten-twenty years, and definitely ramping up from there, so the question will become what does growth look like when limits to growth (energy) no longer apply? Can we enter an age of abundance?