The phrase itself is much, much older, even appearing in Shakespeare. King Lear, Act 2 scene 2.

It doesn't necessarily "mean very little". We don't have a lot of people, true, but we're aware of that fact and function mostly as targeted strike and shock troops. Let the US with its ten times the population field the infantry, send in a Canadian sniper team. JTF2 was the poster child for this stuff in Afghanistan.

It's more about focusing on soft power. We like being seen as more of a quiet, sober, tempering force next to the huge devouring machine that is the US military. Putting boots on the ground risks angering the wrong people, and we don't necessarily have the resources to openly join a conflict like the US can.

I love the old laws that are now completely bonkers because the circumstances that called for them no longer exist.

In some places it is illegal to lie under a public walkway. They made those laws in the days of wooden sidewalks, where you could lie underneath and peek through gaps in the boards to look up ladies skirts.

Cotton is a way more labour intensive crop. The bolls had to be picked by hand, and because they're mostly air they take up a huge volume, meaning more trips back and forth to empty your basket/sack/whatever. In addition to that, there was a MASSIVE upswing in demand for cotton because of the industrial revolution, and the mechanization of textile manufacturing. Suddenly machines could card, spin and weave cotton faster than a hundred people could. With that skyrocketing demand came the plantations, just like with sugar in the Caribbean; huge monoculture farms planting on an industrial scale. You can pay workers to do that, but buying a slave is an upfront cost equal to about a year's wages for a free worker, and you have that slave until they die. Buy a woman and you can make more slaves for no additional cost.

It's monstrous, but they considered it solely an economical decision.

From a farming family here.

There's really only two periods per year where the work is that hard, even pre-industrial, and that's plowing and harvesting. Each is a sort of two week crunch time. The rest of the year is actually pretty chill, you get into a routine.