Thinking Seriously About Halfling Empires

The question of whether halflings are capable of constructing empires, and what those empires would look like, is one which has concerned Western philosophy at least since Plato.

In this post, I mused briefly that:

[A halfling empire] would I think be the anti-empire, the empire of no empires, the empire of paradox, spreading its decentralisation and hairfoot-anarchism across regions, continents, the world...

The idea here is that halfling empire building is almost a living critique of the concept of empire itself - it would comprise what I suppose would have to be called imperialistic libertarianism or perhaps big Englanderism: the aggressive enforcement of quiet, homespun anarchism via conquest.

But let's tone things down a bit and come up with some ideas that are a bit more palatable and useful for gaming purposes. Are there plausible ways in which one could imagine halflings coming to run an empire, given the way they are described in D&D materials?

One obvious way is to posit a deus ex machina explanation: halflings are the only ones who can do some special sort of magic or psionics, which means they can boss around the members of other races; halflings have a symbiotic relationship with some very physically powerful race of beings (I would suggest umber hulks, but neogi have already bagsied those) who can do all the fighting for them; halflings have some special ability which the members of other races are willing to pay to have access to. These could potentially lead in interesting directions, but I think ultimately they cheat a little bit by bending the actual description of halflings as found in the source texts.

Another, less obvious cheat is to imagine that halflings are just really good at commerce (and there is, I suppose, some justification for this if we imagine halflings as, basically, the English: we are after all renowned as a 'nation of shopkeepers' whose own imperial adventures were generally motivated by commercial imperatives over the conquest of land per se). If you are really good at commerce you can pay other people to do things for you; imagine halflings as a race of merchants whose expertise in arbitrage alone allows them to dominate a vast and disparate region united by trade.

Of course, one could also think of halflings as being something more like Hutts - congenitally predisposed towards dastardly criminal enterprises and therefore presiding over a vast feudal anarchy: each halfling 'family' or clan essentially hoovering up taxes from the locals of other races and, in return, exerting a minimal form of stability and order through hired goons. Naturally this would make more sense if they controlled the trade in pipe-weed, though I think the license that this would give DMs to do hammy noo yoik or tutti frutti Napolitan accents means that it is an idea best approached with caution.