"That kind of empire is passe."
And so is the British Empire. Your point is? When I made that comparison it was to contrast an assertion from Alberta's Child that your personal standard of living has to be worse than that of your trading partners in order to achieve wealth and economic health.
Nothing can be further from the truth.
If you want an example from the other end of the spectrum, I refer you to the former Soviet Union. That's a society that eschewed market capitalism and it's standard of living never rose much beyond pre-revolutionary days, even at the height of it's power and industrial might. It seems thatthe Soviet Union (and it's successor states) were only "profitable" in the destructive sense (arms sales) and not the constructive (i.e. for the world consumer market) sense. The Soviet Union managed to last 75 years with virtually no appreciable increase or decrease in real, measurable standards of living.