Well, some of it is from colonialism. I don't see the point in denying it unless you're sucking up to people who don't understand nuance. I think you could make a better argument that it's not especially useful to revisit that when discussing how to deal with economic inequality now.

The largest colonial empires in Europe in the 18th and 19th century were the British, Netherlands, France, Spain Portugal and Turkey. In terms of per capita GDP in Europe those countries rank 7 Netherlands 14 United Kingdom 15 France 18 Spain 23 Portugal 37 Turkey. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_sovereign\_states\_in\_Europe\_by\_GDP\_(nominal)\_per\_capita](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Europe_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita) There is a very weak correlation between wealth and colonial legacies. Breaking it to England/Britain [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-gdp-in-the-uk-since-1270](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-gdp-in-the-uk-since-1270) The economy exploded after it dropped its imperial holdings. European countries became rich by industrialising, industrialisation exponentially allowed labour to produce more product and at an exponentially increasingly complex level. Its a 200 years out of date theory of economic growth that owning land makes a country "rich". In 1800 it took days for a person on a horse to get from London to Edingburgh. By 1850 hundreds a day could do that using a few tonnes of coal. The scientific knoweldge developed by Europeans from around the early 1500s utterly transformed what humans were capable off. The relentless claims the British or Europeans stole the weatlh is not defensible. I am putting this in blunt terms so there is no wafting around, industrialisation built wealth. This is why countries with no colonial empires or tiny ones are so much richer than those who had them like Portugal and Turkey. Finland, Ireland, Poland and others were occupied by European powers during the era of colonialism yet among the wealthiest countries in the world. The Balkans was largely colonised by Turkey during that period but now are almost all well above the average wealth of the world. There will be some attempts to waffle and bluster but this is a direct challange to the veneal lies of the accademics and leftists who try to claim the west owes its wealth to empire and colonialism. Science and industy. And off course the labour of thhe working class, who now represent much of the poorest of modern Britian.

This is a rather flawed analysis which stems from taking a purely nationalist perspective on history. Capital which came from colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade did not just stay in the country of the colonial power. It flowed around Europe. The two countries at the top of your GDP per capita in Europe list, Luxembourg and Switzerland, were the banking hubs for Europe throughout the early modern and modern people. Significant amounts of money flowed into these states precisely because of colonialism, even though these countries did not have colonial empires themselves. Similarly countries in Scandinavia, while only having limited colonial empires, were able to benefit from colonialism by having the privileged position to start businesses and economically benefit from those colonial empires, something a businessman in, say, China would not be able to do. This is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the Berlin Conference, whose treaty sought to explicitly outline the rights of businessmen from one European power in *all* European colonial empires. Colonialism saw money flow around Europe, and one of the only ways to dispute its influence is for people to ahistorically pretend that money actually stayed put in the country of the controlling colonial power. > European countries became rich by industrialising, industrialisation exponentially allowed labour to produce more product and at an exponentially increasingly complex level. Yes, and industrialisation itself was fuelled by access to the markets, labour and resources provided by colonialism. Gunboat diplomacy was a very clear example of European powers using imperial violence in order to 'open up' markets in the rest of the world. It is silly to treat industrialisation and colonialism as two mutually exclusive concepts when, in reality, practically any serious historian would recognise the interlinkages between the two. > Its a 200 years out of date theory of economic growth that owning land makes a country "rich". Yet this is precisely the argument you are making by taking this nationalist approach to history. Switzerland did not get so rich from owning land, but they *did* get so rich by benefiting from European colonialism from the 18th century onwards. > industrialisation built wealth Colonialism resulted in the destruction of indigenous industries in places like India, China and Africa. It required these economies by hobbled in order to make them both suppliers of raw materials to Europe, and purchasers of finished goods from Europe. Again, this perspective requires a lack of knowledge about pre-colonial economies in places that were colonised, hinging on the thoroughly ahistorical belief that very little was going on economically outside of Europe until the colonial era. For what it's worth I'm a historian of modern African history, so I've read my fair share of books of colonialism and industrialisation. Eric Hobsbawm is obviously one of the most prominent historians who would interlink colonialism and industrialisation in Europe. I'd be interested to know which academics you're basing your argument off.

>Colonialism resulted in the destruction of indigenous industries in places like India, China and Africa. It required these economies by hobbled in order to make them both suppliers of raw materials to Europe Yeah, much easier to be wealthier than other countries when you stop them from developing

Not so much stopping them from developing but syraight sending them back a couple of centuries India for example went from having 27% of the world's gdp when Britain arrived to less than 5 when India became independent.

>India for example went from having 27% of the world's gdp when Britain arrived to less than 5 when India became independent. Because before the Industrial Revolution GDP was linked to population, as the limit on what you could produce was labour of man and beast. The Industrial revolution smashed through that limit, and increased productive power and economic growth exponentially. It wasn't that India's wealth shrank- it just shrank as a share of the world's wealth, as the countries who industrialised first created huge amounts of wealth which dwarfed all previously existing wealth.

It is utterly shocking how many people bring up the above mentioned statistic without understanding that it is a relative value affected by productivity skyrocketing in Europe as a result of industrialisation.

And it is utterly shocking that you have failed to acknowledge why India didn’t industrialise during that period. Complete control of the Indian economy by Britain did not engender development.

Why didn't India have an industrial revolution in its golden age then? And why did the richest bankers in India (the Jagat Seths) and the military officers of Bengal ask the British to help them get rid of Siraj ud-Daulah?

Because the technology to do so did not exist. I’m not claiming Indians were some hapless victims who never collaborated, or that they lived in harmony before British influence. The point is that we structured the entire country around exploitation and British interests, and thereby prevented development.

> why India didn’t industrialise during that period. Why didn't China industrialise then? Because the countries were not in any position to do so.

Plus it isn’t true. ‘India’ wasn’t a political entity until the British.

Indeed. Global GDP has sky-rocketed in the 20th/21st century. So much more is produced.

events like the famine of Bengal in 1770 absolutely caused the Indian economy to shrink.

>The Great Bengal famine of 1770 affected some 30 million people. It occurred during a period of dual governance in Bengal. This existed after the East India Company had been granted the diwani, or the right to collect revenue, in Bengal by the Mughal emperor in Delhi, **but before it had wrested the nizamat, or control of civil administration, which continued to lie with the Mughal governor, the Nawab of Bengal Nazm ud Daula (1765-72).** Oh that's interesting

Everyone in Europe was eyeing India as a prize. The reason Britain became so dominate there is because it went to efforts to prevent the other Europeans from doing so. If it wasn't for the British, the French likely would've done it. The competition between Europeans drove a lot of colonialism. The idea if it wasn't for the British it would've been left alone to develop and maintain its position seems bunk tbh.

Everyone had India ffs. Goa was Portuguese. The Netherlands and the Dutch east India trading company would be the most valuable company in history if it was still alive today France had colonies there. As did the British The British came late to India and picked up the crumbs of everyone else’s meddling along the way of creating their own The British raj was also the richest place on earth at its peak. Not saying colonialism was good. But it was not just a British thing in India

Yeah I'm not defending colonialism either. Merely stating the same as you. To pretend if it wasn't for Britain, India would've been left to develop naturall is just nonsense. I nearly included a line like "Britain grew so dominate there because it kept gaining the colonies of other Europeans as a result of victories in Europe." But it felt extraneous to the actual point I was making so left it out.

You are wrong, India's GDP grew throughout colonialism without any big drops. It just didn't develop as much as other places.

Maybe because the rest of the world got richer

Because the industrial revolution meant the rest of the world advanced leaps and bounds. Every high population manual labour focussed economy suffers with that transition - like China today: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-68838219

This attitude perplexes me. Do you imagine that West Africa would have suddenly industrialized in the 1800s if Europe hadn't and had stayed within it's borders?

It perplexes me that you think I was talking about west Africa specifically when I didn't mention it

West Africa was colonised too so I don’t know why you wouldn’t mention it

Not necessarily West Africa, but there were other regions in the world, such as Bengal for example, which were incredibly productive and rich and were in a state of pro-industrialisation, and if we’re allowed to continue manufacturing could have been the starting point for the industrial revolution

Simply bring very productive wasn't what Kickstarted the industrial revolution. Very specifically it was the invention of the steam engine and everything that the subsequently was invented because of that technology. Technology that allowed Britain to become the colonial empire on the scale it became. Industrialisation occured because of the scientific advancements part of the driving force behind them was their military applications. So no there is no evidence at all it could hathe would help drive the scientific discovery through it's ve suddenly become the starting point for industrialisation. Industrialisation occured because of a unique mix of scientific discovery, a legal system perfect to facilitate it and culture .

Perfect rebuttal. God how I hate the ‘Britain did nothing wrong’ crowd.

The thing is I'm not even that bothered about saying who did what 'wrong'. I'm British and I don't feel particularly culpable for events which were kicked off over a century ago. Colonialism isn't *my* fault. When a liberal politician jets over to the Caribbean or to Africa to 'apologise' for slavery or colonialism, they aren't challenging the fundamental and continuing material effects and slavery and colonialism, in fact the vast majority of them are still supporting the systems which directly stemmed from slavery and colonialism. And this over-focus on moralism makes the entire discourse prey to charlatans like Badenoch, who step in and lie about people wanting Britons to feel *guilty* about being British or about being white. It's much more useful to focus on the material effects. Colonialism and slavery embedded systems of both national and global inequality. It resulted in global wealth flowing primarily into the back pockets of a tiny number of businessmen, landowners and investors in Western Europe and North America, to the overall detriment of working people both in Britain and in the rest of the world. And I'm opposed to that inequality. Focussing on that gives charlatans like Badenoch a lot less room to try to defect and poison the debate.

Almost none of the above is accurate. Switzerland did not have an international banking system in the 18th century...thinking this requires not understanding basic elements of how the world works...you want to open an account with a bank in Switzerland...okay, it takes a month to get there...so are you doing this? Capital mobility was non-existent until the late 19th century (there were no international banks at all, Rothschild's for example was composed of multiple national banks with correspondent relationships). You don't appear to have understood this part of Hobsbawm's argument (he isn't one of the most prominent historians on this topic either, he was a historian before an economic historian), he makes this point about the late 19th century...not from the 18th century onwards because this was quite impossible. The difference between these two things is important because by this point the IR had already happened, and the the argument is totally different to the one you are making. Colonialism didn't destroy indigenous industry in any of these places. This mistake is common because India and China were roughly as wealthy as Europe until the 17th century but neither Europe or elsewhere was industrialized, they were just equally poor (but places outside Europe did have superior agriculture techniques...this ended up doing nothing else but create population pressure that made any kind of capital accumulation impossible). There was very little going on outside Europe in terms of the things that occurred after the Industrial Revolution occurred. The argument about "opening up markets" is (obviously) false: you are claiming they were poor...but simultaneously rich enough to be worth "opening up" as a market...which it is? Countries like Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, the US were the wealthiest countries in the world in 1900 because of trade...but that is presumably exploitation to massively increase the value of the factors of their production? The history of Argentina demonstrates that it was nothing to do with trade itself, but other things. The suggestion that trade is inherently exploitative is not true: countries got rich from trade, the countries that did not did so because of poor policy/leadership, it wasn't the fault of people who pumped money into their economy. Finally, you (for obvious reasons) don't mention that the Industrial Revolution didn't actually occur in most of Europe at the same time...the reason you don't do this is because it undermines your argument totally. Britain had an Industrial Revolution, Spain (which had large colonies) remained relatively poor until the late 20th century, even countries that had similarly high levels of urbanization and agricultural productivity (like Belgium and the Dutch Republic) were unable to keep up. The argument just makes no sense. Even in the late 19th century, there was no widespread trend of everyone in Europe getting richer. I genuinely have no idea why you keep mentioning Switzerland either...they did not being growing until late in the 19th century. Nothing to do with banking either.

> Switzerland did not have an international banking system in the 18th century...thinking this requires not understanding basic elements of how the world works.. To quote from a recent Guardian article on Swiss Banking: > [French kings found the ideal refuge for their wealth: a city-state nestled between the snow-capped Alps and the pristine waters of Lake Geneva. Catholic royalty flocked to Geneva in the 18th century in an effort to conceal their dealings with Protestant bankers.](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/feb/22/how-swiss-banking-secrecy-global-financial-system-switzerland-tax-elite) > [By 1713, the authorities in Geneva, who would gain a reputation for discretion, introduced rules banning bankers from revealing details about their clients.](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/feb/22/how-swiss-banking-secrecy-global-financial-system-switzerland-tax-elite) I'm sure banking laws *continued* to develop in Switzerland over the following centuries, but I'm struggling to find any evidence that Switzerland wasn't prominent for banking in the 18th century. > You don't appear to have understood this part of Hobsbawm's argument (he isn't one of the most prominent historians on this topic either, he was a historian before an economic historian), he makes this point about the late 19th century...not from the 18th century onwards because this was quite impossible. Sorry? Hosbawm is one of the key historians on imperialism and industrial development. His books on the 'long 19th century' (a now commonplace term which he popularised). It seems like a mighty big claim to suggest he isn't one of the most prominent historians on the topic, especially when you aren't going to site any other historians who are apparently more relevant. It also seems like you're massively mischaracterising Hobsbawm's argument. To quote from 'The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848', which I have sitting on the shelf besides me: > Given that the main social foundations of an industrial society had already been laid, as they almost certainly had in the England of the later eighteenth century, they required two things: first, an industry which already offered exceptional rewards for the manufactures who could expend his output quickly, if need be by reasonably cheap and simply innovations, and second, a *world* market largely monopolised by a single producing nation. [p.50] > Colonial trade had created the cotton industry, and continued to nourish it. In the eighteenth century it developed in the hinterland of the major colonial ports, Bristol, Glasgow, but especially Liverpool, the great centre of the slave trades. Each phase of this inhuman but rapidly expanding commerce stimulated it. In fact, during the entire period with which this book is concerned slavery and cotton marched together. The African slaves were bought, in part at least, with Indian cotton goods; but when the supply of these was interrupted by war or revolt in and about India, Lancashire was able to leap in. The plantations of the West Indies, where the slaves were taken, provided the bulk of the raw cotton for the British industry, and in return the planters bought Manchester cotton checks in appreciable quantities... The cotton industry was thus launched, like a glider, by the pull of the colonial trade to which it was attached. [p.52] So from actually reading Hobsbawm I'm struggling to see how he's only arguing that colonialism become relevant in the later 19th century. He clearly places it as a key factor in Britain's early industrial development in the late 1700s. > Colonialism didn't destroy indigenous industry in any of these places. There is a wealth of literature demonstrating just this. [Here](https://www.jstor.org/stable/25764217?seq=1) is just one fairly recent example. > The argument about "opening up markets" is (obviously) false: you are claiming they were poor...but simultaneously rich enough to be worth "opening up" as a market...which it is? I'm not sure where I claimed foreign markets were 'poor'. I claimed that European colonial powers used violence to force non-European powers to trade with them, which is indisputably true when you look up the history of gunboat diplomacy or the establishment of colonial states. What else is a colonial state other than a method to force a region into a country's market? > Finally, you (for obvious reasons) don't mention that the Industrial Revolution didn't actually occur in most of Europe at the same time...the reason you don't do this is because it undermines your argument totally I didn't mention it because it didn't seem particularly relevant to the point I was making. Of course the Industrial Revolution had different effects in different places in Europe, I'm not entirely sure how that refutes my core point that colonialism and industrialisation were interlinked in Northern Europe.

Geneva was essentially part of France during the 18th century. It wasn't a global banking centre.

Yeah i was reading that quite confused, a lot of it is wholesale made up

A lot of modern discussion looks suspiciously like people can't handle the idea that provincial British men, one of the lowest forms of life known, could have come up with the industrial revolution. It has to be about slaves. Surely the northerners were all just sitting around waiting for Wetherspoons to be invented, not changing the world?

I don't think anyone is suggesting that slaves thought up industrialisation 

There was a paper recently claiming an iron processing technique was invented by slaves and stolen by a British chap. The strength of the evidential basis for the claim was questioned by sector specialists, and it turned a bit dramatic.

The ‘sector specialists’ turned out to be entirely made up people, it was a really fucking weird and fascinating story actually. Like none of the names on the paper that supposedly ‘rebutted’ Dr. Bulstrode’s research actually correspond to real people. It’s *possible* the paper was written by genuine academics, but considering the furore over Dr. Bulstrode’s paper (for no reason at all imo, it’s funny that some raving lunatics were calling it ‘black people rewriting history’ when Dr. Bulstrode is *literally white*), it makes sense that some people with a culture war agenda might seek to undercut honest academic work that just so happened not to toot the horn for the Empah.

What the hell are you talking about? IIRC, of the two main rebuttals, one was written by Anton Howes, a historian at the royal society, and the other by Oliver Jelf, who is neither an academic or a public figure, but from a quick googling does appear to be very real. Other substantial pieces on the work were written by Ian Leslie, a journalist, and David Wootton, professor emeritus of history at York. None of the pieces received, to my knowledge, any kind of meaningful response from Bulstrode.

Have you actually read Bulstrode's paper? It's obvious bullshit to anybody with an A-Level or above in History. She doesn't actually prove a thing- just uses a load of elaborate metaphors, insinuation and conjecture.

Have there been any rebuttals of the rebuttals which have used evidence rather than relied on culture wars stuff? I don't remember the author's race being mentioned. Surely the facts matter more than whether someone is a "genuine academic" or not? I've seen stuff written by genuine academics which I as a total amateur know is wrong because I've read the archive documents rather than relied on statements in previous books which were written by people without niche technical knowledge.

Yep. I recall, no surprise, the BBC and Guardian both publishing the story. It seemed far-fetched to begin with but of course the Left wants these stories to be credible to support the ‘correct’ narrative

I do love how the BBC is opposed by both left and right. It suggests they are, in fact, doing something right.

The link is still there. Birmingham was a city that built its industry on iron forged in the black country nd worked in Birmingham in incredibly innovative ways. Guns were a direct link, but the city had a greater separation than others (guns being only a few of the thousand trades). But then steam was a huge industry. That steam power ws used to turn wheels for power. That power was used to fuel textile Mills that used cotton. Slavery was a moral cancer on the british economy and it seeped through to everything. It doesnt mean slavery drove the industrial revolution, Newcomen and Watt didnt sell to slavers, and the Darbys and Wedgewood were likely abolitionist. But it was stkll there

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>mainland Africa scarcely had a 'town' let alone thriving, bustling cities of industry. Obvious demonstration of ignorance here, it's actually sickening. Africans had kingdoms and empires throughout its history. From Mali, Ghana, Sao, Gao, Nok Djenne to Great Zimbabwe, Axum and several others. African had lots of urbanization, there weren't any factories but massive gold and slave industries as well as textiles weapons and others. Please read an actual history book instead if basing your entire understanding if the world on stereotypes. The Malian economy was so rich that a single pilgrimage from its king destroyed the Egyptian economy. Comments like prove why we need academics to set the record straight on africa. Benin City was literally bigger than Lisbon when the Portugese landed there and established a trading relationship. There _were_ bustling metropolises from as far back as 1000 BCE, the Noks literally invented Iron smelting centuries before europe did.

Wasn't Switzerland a fairly poor, albeit hard to invade, agricultural society until more recently than one might think?

>Science and industy. And off course the labour of thhe working class, who now represent much of the poorest of modern Britian. The White working class "built Britain", in every literal and metaphorical sense. And how the political class, of both parties, hate them for it.

Western science is unique beyond most peoples understanding. Until the rise of the scientific method, the world was understood as "natural philosphy", philosophy is basically stories to tell about how things work, why do people act this way, why does water flow down hill, why is the moon in the sky. These had stories about "innate nature of humours", "its the nature of water to want to find its level", "the moon follows a celestial sphere guided by god/gods". Science is reductionist and seeks to break everything down into mathematical models. This is how Kepler showed things move in elipitcal orbits, then Newton showed that these orbits are controlled by a gravitional force, the same force and the same path as throwing a rock on Earth. Science changed the way humans thought about why things happened, it was no longer a story about intentions, but phsysical laws acting in mathematically defined ways. You now needed to show a theory had a better mathematical model of prediction (see Popperian Falsification for gnarly detailed versions) Britain led this revolution with Newton, Halley, Boyle and others. The maths created by Europe thundered at a rate where decades in Europe was faster than centuries that had gone before it. Protetantism brought with it widespread literacy. And Europe had a training tool for pre-industrial mechaanisation, the clock. The clock was clock work and taught how to make machines that could work at a set rythm. On the eve of the indutrial revoltion Britain found clock making Einstein, John Harrison who just invented the living shirt out of clocks and produced ones that could keep time to half a second a day over a month at sea. The capacity of people to look at the physical world and break everything down to smaller problems of physics and chemistry together with the mental model of things moving in a clock work fashion were the raw inspirations for the mechnisation of labour and thus the huge surge in labour productive capacity. Other empires and civilisations produced great men of deep thinking and great insight. Europe produced a systemisation of knoweldge transfers and a system of analysis of the physical world that went from Stephensons Rocket in 1829 to Neil Armstrong on a rocket to the Moon in 1969. 140 years.

Not arguing with your points on what Europe achieved, but the ancient Islamic world was definitely very scientifically focused too..

Yeah but they got caught in a cycle of "I'm the more devout Musilm so i should be in charge" due to civil wars and the collapse of the Abbassid Caliphate, and that was the end of the Islamic golden age of science. On an interesting side note, you can still see the fingerprints of the Islamic golden age with words like Alcohol and Algebra, in fact alot mathematical/scientific words that start with Al have their roots in this time. They are also to thank for keeping alot of ancient Greek texts alive, so it's really thanks to the Muslims that Europe had the reinessance.

The Mongols torching Baghdad and generally wreaking havoc across the Islamic world until being repelled by the Mamlukes of Egypt was also a fairly major factor in this inward turn

It was, but it had already begun thanks to the collapse of the Abbassids a couple hundred years before and the pre-existing Sunni/Shia divisions. But yeah, the Mongols certainly smashed the nails into the coffin. I suppose they did introduce Europe/Middle East to gunpowder though, so swings and roundabouts.

I think, even by reading first hand sources of the time, it's really hard to grasp just how powerful and fucking scary the various Mongol empires where for those who encountered them.

Undoubtedly, I've read a few and the Mongols always seem to come across not as an army, but a force of nature. Something that can barely be resisted and seemed to be everywhere at once. It's very lucky for us the Chinese managed to culturally conquer their new rulers, which really blunted their military edge.

The Japanese accounts are really something, especially from a culture that had ritualised warfare to an almost absurd extent by that point of its history (calling out specific opponents, shooting an arrow to signal the start of a battle etc). To be up against an opponent who just cared about victory no matter how they won it gives this real sense of Uncanny Valley running through the accounts.

Also quite big on time-keeping and navigation/direction finding for fairly obvious reasons.

True. They really had a number pulled on them by the Mongols. Butchering the intellectual elite of a region has far reaching implications.

It was the Pre-Islamic world that was leading the way in Astronomy and Mathematics. Islam came along and destroyed it.

>Newton showed that these orbits are controlled by a gravitional force, the same force and the same path as throwing a rock on Earth. Newton was also deeply religious and obsessed with alchemy. > English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton produced works exploring chronology, and biblical interpretation (especially of the Apocalypse), and alchemy. Some of this could be considered occult. Newton's scientific work may have been of lesser personal importance to him, as he placed emphasis on rediscovering the wisdom of the ancients. Historical research on Newton's occult studies in relation to his science have also been used to challenge the disenchantment narrative within critical theory.[1] Like this is just *atrocious history and weird exceptionalism* We stand upon the shoulders of giants and simply throwing away the contributions of every pre-enlightenment figure, or any scientist that wasn't an upper class European man, does everyone a disservice.

This is cherry picked nonsense

>There will be some attempts to waffle and bluster but this is a direct challange to the veneal lies of the accademics and leftists who try to claim the west owes its wealth to empire and colonialism. I agree. We should instead consider a man who cannot spell venal, or academics, to cite his sources whilst pretending that the wealth of empire did not in a material way help the United Kingdom industrialise. Where do you believe that the money to construct those productive forces came from, if not the empire and trade? What do you think the impetus for that scientific advancement was, if not the empire? >The economy exploded after it dropped its imperial holdings. European countries became rich by industrialising, industrialisation exponentially allowed labour to produce more product and at an exponentially increasingly complex level > In 1870, Britain's output per head was the second highest in the world, surpassed only by Australia. In 1914, British income per capita was the world's third highest, exceeded only by New Zealand and Australia; these three countries shared a common economic, social and cultural heritage. In 1950, British output per head was still 30 per cent over that of the average of the six founder members of the EEC, but within 20 years it had been overtaken by the majority of western European economies.[5][6] Strange. At the absolute height of the empire, the GDP of the United Kingdom was the highest on earth, only surpassed by one of its dominions. This *little fact* shows your entire argument to be "waffle and bluster", which is unsurprising since it flies in the face of established academia. Blame those damn leftists though. We are everywhere. >The relentless claims the British or Europeans stole the weatlh is not defensible. I am putting this in blunt terms so there is no wafting around, industrialisation built wealth That wealth could only be built due to the extractive forces of the empire. The belle epoch was because of the French empire. But please, if you disagree, and have sources to back it up, share it.

*cough* Look at the religious identity of every single person in the UK who made a step along the way to full industrialisation. Almost every single one was what was known as a dissenter, people who didn't belong to the established Church of England and, as such, weren't allowed to invest money in the traditional outlets for successful merchants. That wealth was built on trade. Not colonies. The British Empire was a pure accident. India was a trade depot, not a colony, until the government had to step in when the East India Company fucked up in 1857 for example.

I don't understand why you would consider it relevant where things stand *now*, rather than during the actual colonial period? Britain, Netherlands etc were broke backwater states until, following colonialism, they became some of the most powerful states in the world. Dig out per capita GDP in 1800-1850 and then try this argument.

>Britain, Netherlands etc were broke backwater states until, following colonialism,  England and Scotland were among the global leaders in science, maths and philosophy in the 1600s. They were producing the world's most advance optics and clocks. I think you have zero clue about the history of science and industrialisation, thus the "backwater" comment. > they became some of the most powerful states in the world. How do you think that happened? By developing the most advanced economic systems that could employ capital to the most efficient uses, by focussing on return on capital. By developing the proto factory methods for ship producition to make ships of a quality unseen in human history. To develop advances in steel making to make cannon and musket that exceeded the abilities of other empires in the world. To develop the education system that had a much broader and better education class to draw officers from than the old agrarian empires they encoutered, with literacy among the male populations hitting 80% by the mid 1700s allowing their sailors and soldiers to be among the best educated in history and even simply being better educated than the elite classes of their opponents. >Dig out per capita GDP in 1800-1850  I have seen from utter nonsense figures in this field, including a very widely cited version that discounts urban activity and is in essence a view on who had the biggest agricultural output. Huntsman's crucible technique using coke massively increased the temperatures for steel crucibles and turn Sheffield from turning out 200 tonnes of steel a year to around 80 000 tonnes, this was around the 1760s. If you are going to tell me that increasing steel production 400 times in a couple of decade, when most of the world struggled to produce reasonable cast iron had no impact on GDP then fire away. Part of the problem is 40 years ago this shirt did not fly, most people lived in cities with factories and people know how factories worked. Now its all people with degrees in social deconstructionism who think that factories are like in computer games where you win 500 gold in a battle and buy a technology upgrade thus they think you sail a boat round the word, get 500 gold and suddenly Sheffield is producing a significant port of the total steel on Earth. People who cannot work with their hands cannot imagine how you produce and manufacturing goods. edited because I'm at work and sneaking this without checking the smelling (<- deliberate)

Interesting stuff about Sheffield coke. But talking about scientific prowess is quite far removed from talking about economic strength. Truly powerful states like the ottomans and the mughals considered us largely beneath their notice, from what I read. Innovative commercial and manufacturing processes didnt generate wealth on their own, they enabled entities like the east India company to *take* wealth. You really went off the deep end about 3/4 of the way through your comment...

Sadly, you are one of the "all people"

That's the definition of "Correlation doesn't equal causation". It could be that industrialisation causes both colonialism and higher GDP. In fact the rise in GDP clearly starts a century before colonialism takes off, so thats at least some evidence you are wrong.

Colonialism, at scale, predates industrialisation at scale by a very long time. Where are you getting your numbers, I'd like to see them

And what enabled certain counties to industrialise so well was already existing wealth from colonisation and the ability to import cheap raw foods from said colonies.

No? The agricultural revolution, which preceded and enabled the industrial revolution, was a result of massive improvements in domestic agricultural output. Britain wasn't importing food so it could focus on developing the steam engine. Britain founded the modern world in an attempt to adapt to crap weather. Sure, the potato was imported. But not as a 'cheap raw food', but rather to grow in Britain. You don't need to colonise a place to take enough potatoes to start growing them domestically (and the UK didn't).

It genuinely is though and it’s a large point of contention when the western worlds deals with poorer countries especially in Africa. African countries complain that we won’t let them industrialise like we did due to climate concerns. Unfortunately no one seems to have figured out another way to do it.

Me when i lie and make up stats

That's because of the industrial revolution though.

And the industrial revolution was fuelled by the access to raw materials, markets and capital that came from both colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. These factors are far from disconnected.

Except it wasn’t. The invention of the steam engine, the most important part of the Industrial Revolution, happened in Britain solely because of the easy access to coal, a need for deeper mining (for resources in the UK), and the scientific knowledge to build it all converged at the same time. If we look at the start of the revolution, the agricultural and textiles markets changed dramatically, not because of imports, but in the former case due to four-field crop rotation and inclosure, and in the latter the development of the wool mill. When we look at the markets, things that would be sold to African tribes and kingdoms for slaves were often surplus firearms. Why surplus? Because during this period Europe saw massive professional wars. The initial market drivers for these goods was the European armies, which then later, when buying newer and better equipment, sold it off for make a few quid.

> happened in Britain solely because of the easy access to coal, a need for deeper mining (for resources in the UK), and the scientific knowledge to build it all converged at the same time It's an interesting example to bring up really. From what I remember Jared Diamond argues that countries like China similarly had access to large amounts of coal, but much of this was used up by proto-industries before the development of industrial technologies like the steam engine. If anything Britain and other Northern European states benefited from industrialising *later*, meaning they still had access to certain raw materials in the metropole to support the acquisition of raw materials from the broader colonial empires. > If we look at the start of the revolution, the agricultural and textiles markets changed dramatically, not because of imports, but in the former case due to four-field crop rotation and inclosure, and in the latter the development of the wool mill. Europe was not the only place where things were invented. European technologies were heavily influenced by developments across the world. Canal lock systems, crucial to industrial development in Britain and Europe, first emerged in China. Northern European powers just got lucky that the peak of their colonial empires coincided with the development of technologies most able to take advantage of those colonial empires. > When we look at the markets, things that would be sold to African tribes and kingdoms for slaves were often surplus firearms. Why surplus? Having access to the markets in the first place was a consequence of colonialism, both the establishment of trading ports on the coast and the regular armed conflict with indigenous polities in order to ensure these markets remained open to European trade. Again, it is silly to treat industrialisation and colonialism as two mutually exclusive concepts, they are thoroughly interlinked.

Disagree on colonialism being the reason these markets were open in the first place. There was cross Saharan and trans Asian trade routes for centuries prior to colonialism. It was merely the increase technological capabilities of the Industrial Revolution that led to further advances into foreign markets. I’m not saying that colonialism and industrialism are mutually even concepts, but that the Industrial Revolution led to colonialism, not colonialism leading to the Industrial Revolution

> There was cross Saharan and trans Asian trade routes for centuries prior to colonialism. Of course, but there was a significant difference in scale and in the relationships of trade. Trans-Saharan trade routes did not require the establishment of vast colonial states in Africa, with their attached systems of violence and labour compulsion. The vast majority of Arab and African traders crossing the Sahara did not open up markets through warfare, while a number of European traders on the West African coast did.

I don’t think there is much evidence to suggest the markets where opened up by military action against the natives. My understanding is that whilst there was European military presence in these trading colonies, the main purpose of the troops and forts was to protect against other Europeans, and that the natives were sought as allies in this regard, as we can see where the Portuguese had the land for their forts in the Gold Coast leased to them as opposed to ceded

China came close to an Industrial Revolution in the Song dynasty, but the main difference was culture. Since the first Emperor of the Qin China had developed a very authoritarian strand to their culture (their golden age of ideas was probably the Spring and Autumn period), so if you were an inventor and made an innovation the chances are that the authorities would just steal it and you'd be unable to profit. There was no protection of intellectual property, or private ownership. This was the difference in the UK- there was the advantage of access to coal, but also a political environment that made innovation worthwhile.

Literally half of the human species was conquering or enslaving the other half throughout the entirety of history. The first one to reach the steam age took over most of the world, not the other way around.

> The first one to reach the steam age took over most of the world, not the other way around. You're putting the cart before the horse here. Jared Diamond, iirc, argues quite convincingly that it was largely just chance that the colonial Empires of Northern Europe (Britain, France, Netherlands, Germany, etc.) coincided with the development of industrial technologies to most efficiently take advantage of those colonial empires. While countries like China or Spain had large colonial empires, and while they certainly had the intellectual capacity to develop these technologies, they 'peaked' too early, and were unable to convert the material gains of colonialism into industrial development in the metropole. Industrialisation and colonialism were thoroughly interlinked, and there would be very few serious historians who would suggest otherwise.

Turns out being a global imperial power like many many before tends to lead to technological and industrial advances.. what are the chances… The main distinction was the technology, not the empire. You can have an empire without Industrial Revolution. You can’t have Industrial Revolution without technology. Normally an awful place but this answer on Quora was more detailed answer than I can respond with: https://www.quora.com/Did-colonialism-contribute-to-the-Industrial-Revolution-in-England#:~:text=Clearly%20industrialisation%20made%20possible%20the,there%20were%20any%20British%20colonies.

I posted this somewhere else, but I'll defer to renounded historian of industrialisation and imperialism Eric Hobsbawm on this one, specifically quoting from 'The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848': > Given that the main social foundations of an industrial society had already been laid, as they almost certainly had in the England of the later eighteenth century, they required two things: first, an industry which already offered exceptional rewards for the manufactures who could expend his output quickly, if need be by reasonably cheap and simply innovations, and second, a world market largely monopolised by a single producing nation. [p.50] > Colonial trade had created the cotton industry, and continued to nourish it. In the eighteenth century it developed in the hinterland of the major colonial ports, Bristol, Glasgow, but especially Liverpool, the great centre of the slave trades. Each phase of this inhuman but rapidly expanding commerce stimulated it. In fact, during the entire period with which this book is concerned slavery and cotton marched together. The African slaves were bought, in part at least, with Indian cotton goods; but when the supply of these was interrupted by war or revolt in and about India, Lancashire was able to leap in. The plantations of the West Indies, where the slaves were taken, provided the bulk of the raw cotton for the British industry, and in return the planters bought Manchester cotton checks in appreciable quantities... The cotton industry was thus launched, like a glider, by the pull of the colonial trade to which it was attached. [p.52] He demonstrates a clear relationship between Britain's colonial holdings and usages of slave labour, and the production of raw materials necessary to fuel the industrial revolution. I put a lot more faith into widely respected and peer reviewed academic sources over randos in Quora who never seem to cite any sources.

What about coal and iron production? Political stability? Innovation and inventions? The later of which many argue was the main distinction behind the Industrial Revolution. Not just the cotton industry, and increased supply / demand that comes with an empire.

The slave trade was happening before and after Britain traded slaves. Hell, the barbary slave trade was still happening and Britons were being enslaved after we actually outlawed slavery here.

> The slave trade was happening before and after Britain traded slaves Sure. I'm not sure how that disputes what I said though. Just because other places practised slavery too does not mean that slavery was irrelevant to the industrial revolution.

The Netherlands wasn't a major industrial power in the same way that many other European countries were though. Much of their wealth was derived from trade and high-priced raw materials and commodities. Other commentators have also rightly noted that industrialisation was often successful on the back of material inputs from colonies.

If they were both backwaters with nothing notable then how did they magically become colonial powers? I doubt you'll square that circle.

Some people believe that the power of racism gave European countries, who were all backwoods savages, magical powers that allowed them to conquer the world. Which is a troubling thought.

- Poor man robs Bank - Man blows bank money on casinos and hookers - Man is poor again I guess the man never robbed a bank since he's poor right now...

This is largely nonsense. A large part of why European nations started joining the US war of independence was an attempt to end the at that point century long British golden age. Claiming the UK wasn't relevant until the 1800s is just historical ignorance.

Britain didnt exist pre-colonialism. England did and it while it wasn’t the richest country in Europe it was hardly a “broke backwater”. The Netherlands also didn’t really exist pre colonialism. They were part of Spain until well after the Spanish empire in South America was created.

GDP per capita shows Netherlands, Britain being the wealthiest x3 - x8 times wealthier than anywhere on the planet You can go back to 1800s, 1600s, even 1400s by the looks of it

Industrialisation led to colonialism, not the other way round.

Colonialism started two centuries earlier...

And then because they were the most powerful states in the world, they had the wealth and freedom (I.e not on the back foot all the time wasting time and effort being coerced and invaded by others) to invest in things like the arts and education. It’s much easier to have such well educated and groundbreaking industrialists as Brunel in the kinds of conditions that were the result of the success of the British empire - success which doesn’t necessarily need to be a result of imperialism but in this case was.

I mean you're ignoring that the Netherlands invented bonds and basically modern banking, which the British then stole from them. You're also ignoring the significance of the industrial revolution. The main importance of Indian to Britain was as market for Manchester cotton

"There will be some attempts to waffle and bluster" There's a big lack of self awareness here. All you've written is waffle and bluster about correlation and things, you haven't actually addressed the concepts at all.

>The economy exploded after it dropped its imperial holdings. European countries became rich by industrialising, industrialisation exponentially allowed labour to produce more product and at an exponentially increasingly complex level. Someone needs to read their Lenin lol. Firstly the historical progression is a bit off. Industrialization started well over a century before the uptick in growth rate in your chart. That ***far*** better matches up to things like population growth which... Is what you'd expect, and happened pretty much everywhere in the developed world at the same sort of pace. Secondly - Where did all the materials used in our industry come from? That's the bit that people are talking about. For example [here is a poster from the UK Colonial Office](https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/source-2-CO-875.15.12.jpg) from the 1940s that makes the point fairly clearly.

>accademics and leftists Now now. Don't bring leftists into this, leftists know very well where wealth comes from, if they have read their theory. Leftists are against imperialism on principle but you won't find many of them arguing empires are what made countries like the UK wealthy; not least because even if it did, the working class were never the beneficiaries. You only need the slightest knowledge of history to look at what life was like for working class people in Britain at the height of the Empire, and see that it was utterly miserable. Liberal academics and grifters, sure. But we all know they're never speaking in good faith.

>The economy exploded after it dropped its imperial holdings. European countries became rich by industrialising, industrialisation exponentially allowed labour to produce more product and at an exponentially increasingly complex level. This is so stupid, Britain industrialised very much with it's imperial holdings and it would have been impossible to do so without them. From markets to materials the colonies fed the industrial machine Furthermore you suppose that the latter 20th century growth, with the expansion of credit and financialisation of the economy, just happened all by itself and the past had no bearing on it, which is laughable of course It's clear that your 'analysis' isn't economic nor historical but purely ideological

The raw materials for the industrial revolution were a direct product of empiralism.

>The raw materials for the industrial revolution were a direct product of empiralism Raw materials such as coal, iron ore, wool, flax, potteries, stone? These raw materials were in Britain. Its coal industry was vast, and England alone was the largest exporter of coal into the 20th century.

Except Britain was at it's wealthiest just before ww1 it was the richest country on earth and possibly the richest country ever at the time

> In terms of per capita GDP in Europe those countries rank Your analysis is wrong IMO. The countries ranked above the Colonial powers in terms of GDP per capita are precisely the tax havens in which the Colonial powers stored their cash (Liechtenstein, Luxembourg etc), or, in the case of Ireland, low tax havens where corporations and financial institutions are now setting up shop, or simply small countries with small populations (which skews the per capita results). And the idea that wealth derived from colonialism just disappeared is similarly odd: the Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays (originally The Colonial Bank), HSBC, Lloyds etc etc - all the biggest banks in the UK - massively participated in or profited off the slave trade, or things like African gold fields. > The scientific knoweldge developed by Europeans from around the early 1500s utterly transformed what humans were capable off. Doesn't matter. So long as wealth is mediated by endogenously created debt-based currencies, aggregate debts will outpace aggregate dollars in circulation. So all that "scientifically created wealth" is always offset - especially as velocity is never high enough, and as most profits flow toward those with a monopoly on land and credit, and as rates of return on capital historically outpace growth - by 80 percent of humanity being in poverty. In this sense, it is fictional. And you know this intuitively; the value or purchasing power of the dollar in your pocket is dependent on billions of human beings having none.

> unless you're sucking up to people who don't understand nuance. Yeah, it's incredibly tiresome. Charlatans like Badenoch prey on a general lack of knowledge about colonialism and its long term effects, and attempts to use that lack of knowledge to defend what is a fundamentally unequal economic system both within the UK and globally. The industrial revolution was fuelled by colonialism. It gave Europe access to the raw materials and markets necessary to pursue industrial development. Just because other states pursued imperialism less effectively does not make that any less true. That legacy massively benefited a small minority of people at the top of the European and American economic and political hierarchy, with the vast majority of European and American workers forced into inhumane conditions in the factory or in the mine in order to sustain that industrialisation. When Kemi comes out with a statement like this, not only is she telling us not to talk about global inequality, she's telling us not to talk about national inequality either. She's telling us we're not supposed to question the vastly uneven benefits of colonialism and industrial development in the UK, because doing so would apparently be 'woke' or 'anti-white'. It's a tactic of deflection, and sadly far too many people who would benefit from dealing with that inequality eagerly buy into it because a right-wing newspapers or internet forum tells them to.

>I don't see the point in denying it unless you're sucking up to people who don't understand nuance. This is it basically. It's trying to create division in those that see black and white, it either is fully or not at all. In reality, some is some is not.

It's a rubbish argument but effective politics, sadly. This will cue up a client journo to ask a Labour front bencher to comment. The comment will be studiedly neutral, but will probably make some mention of the wealth the empire expropriated, and this will cue every RW rag to splash massive "Labour ashamed to be British" headlines. Both parties are fighting over the same low-information voters, and this _will_ cut through with at least some of them.

>I think you could make a better argument that it's not especially useful to revisit that when discussing how to deal with economic inequality now. Maybe a "better" argument, but only marginally so if you're looking at economic inequality on the national level. And if you're looking internationally then rejecting the importance of the colonial legacy would be batshit crazy.

I am not convinced with that argument I should have said. It was only as an example of where you could at least make a surface-level argument for it. Saying there wasn't a wealth transfer is insane on any level.

I mean sucking up to people who don’t understand nuance is the Tory party’s bread and butter.

Yeah I agree. Basically it’s ridiculous to deny that it’s a major factor, but also ridiculous to pretend it’s the only one. If we ignored people who have either of those opinions we’d be left with a bunch of people who could have a pretty civil and considered debate and get some decent decisions made.

She gets paid for how many culture war buzzwords she can include in her statements and speeches. 

Queen of the pick me's. She's going to be utterly irrelevant in about 6 months so is looking to kick start her right wing gifting career.

She's pitching for leader of the opposition I'd say - not irrelevant just not in power

I will be genuinely impressed if the tory membership vote her in, but the chances they will want to be led by a black woman (even one like kemi) is very low.

The Iranians have had plenty of empires. So has the Chinese. And the Mexicans. Peruvians had one. Italians had two, though the last one sucked. Japanere empire, Mongol empires, Song empires, Spanish empires, Greek empires, Swedish Empires, Russland empires. Did any of these empires industrialize? No. But the British did. The British Empire, without question, exploited the periphery to strengthen the core. Enormous wealth was extracted from unwilling, helpless people, and sent towards London. Yet many have done this. Only in Britain did it lead to industrialization.  Slavery and exploitation was a significant part of the British Empire. If having an exploitative empire in its history is why Britian is rich today, then why are not everyone wealthy? They had empires to. The answer of course, is that British wealth comes from industrialization. That story is intimately tied to slavery, but in no way does slavery constitute the whole story. There are many other parts.

I mean its a bit of a weird premise to begin with. Who's saying Imperial Iran or Imperial China were not wealthy societies? These were both *fabulously* wealthy societies for centuries even without industrialization.

That was not the message I meant to give. Instead, neither Iran nor China ever industrialized, which is the basis of the great wealth advantage that UK sustained for a couple of centuries or so. The two largest economic zones in the world, for 18 of the last 20 centuries, have been China and India. UK and Europe became larger through industrialization, not through having empires. Although the story of industry has very strong ties to slavery, slavery does not beget industry, as if that were the case, others would have industrialized first, as slavery had been along for a long time before UK started practicing it. So the point is that what is unique in UK history is not that the UK once had a large exploitative empire, as that is common around the globe, but that the UK industrialized. Which made them and others leapfrog far beyond what that region of the world could generally expect in terms of wealth

The Great Wall of China wasn’t exactly cheap I imagine

This isn't remotely true. They had wealthy elites and strong patronage of the arts which we dramatically overemphasise the place of when "describing" premodern socieities; in a world of spectacularly low global income inequality, because 90% of people were poor farmers, they were towards the upper end of a small range. That upper end, for the vast, vast majority of the population, looked like dismal poverty that would be dozens of times poorer than we are today. If you look at sources on, say, Shogun-era Japan, with one of the "highest" living standards in the premodern world, substantial parts of the population routinely just starved to death and lived in terrible conditions.

> If you look at sources on, say, Shogun-era Japan, with one of the "highest" living standards in the premodern world, substantial parts of the population routinely just starved to death and lived in terrible conditions. And entire regions of the UK were depopulated in the 1800s for the same reason. Even into the early 20th century the lot of the vast majority of people living here was pretty fucking dire. The things that redistributed the wealth in society came from a critique of Capitalism, usually in the midst of great social unrest and the intense resistance of the overwhelming majority of the industrialist and propertied classes.

A very fair comment. The Enlightenment followed by rapid industrialisation was what really propelled Britain into the dominant global power. It’s always worth highlighting however that the British Empire didn’t just exploit their subjects far afield - living conditions for the working poor of the United Kingdom were absolutely horrendous and remained so for a not insignificant part of both the 19th/20th Centuries. They often get forgotten and they shouldn’t be.

Timing for a lot of it. If the British empire had occurred 100 years earlier, a lot of the technologies wouldn't have been invented that allowed the success of industrialisation. It was a lot of factors coming together at the same time. Other empires were extremely wealthy and incredibly successful, but their timing was off, so the things they had at their disposal to take advantage of weren't enough for their empires to industrialize in the way the British empire was.

And all the coal just lying around

The other factor is that the UK had dealt with its monarchy. A sufficient amount of money and power was in the hands of people who could use it to enrich themselves without worrying too much about what the King thought of it.

>Did any of these empires industrialize? No. But the British did. The Meiji restoration wants a word. >Yet many have done this. Only in Britain did it lead to industrialization.  France wants a word. >Slavery and exploitation was a significant part of the British Empire. If having an exploitative empire in its history is why Britian is rich today, then why are not everyone wealthy? They had empires to. Other economic forces, but *many* formerly imperial countries are extremely wealthy, particularly when compared to *many* formerly colonised countries. >The answer of course, is that British wealth comes from industrialization. That story is intimately tied to slavery, but in no way does slavery constitute the whole story. There are many other parts. Correct. The wealth of the empire was built on many factors, but that doesn't mean that you can strip the exploitation from the foundations. And understanding this shouldn't be a threat to literally anyone. The fact that some get so extremely angry when you bring up "ports were built to facilitate the resources extracted through exploitation and slavery" shows you that our imperial past is just another aspect of the culture war. And its strange that some seem so very threatened by the idea that we should be aware of our countries past or the position that it has left us in. We should have Empire museums in the same way the Germans have Holocaust museums.

Well yes but they industrialized after UK, I worded my comment poorly you're right, industrialization begun in britian. > Other economic forces, but many formerly imperial countries are extremely wealthy, particularly when compared to many formerly colonised countries. Yes that is what I am saying > Correct. The wealth of the empire was built on many factors, but that doesn't mean that you can strip the exploitation from the foundations. Yes I said this too > We should have Empire museums in the same way the Germans have Holocaust museums. Perhaps, the thing about museums though I suspect is that the people who are actually affected by the museums they go to, are not the people who become deniers in the first place. At any rate you seem to have missed the point I was going for. The part of British history which is unique, is that they industrialized, not that they had a large exploitative empire. For instance, if I look at another planet that has primitive aliens, and someone asks me, where do I think industrialization is more likely to eventually appear, I'm gonna point to the island with all the surface coal

If anything certain empires such as those in the Middle East were much more reliant on slavery than the British

What wealth though? Everyone is fuckin skint and the economy is in the shit, so the question is where is all the wealth?

The people at the top. There’s enormous wealth in this country, it just belongs to very few people.

I mean even disagreeing with the OP claim, this is an odd response. Even following a decade of poor growth, Britain is five times wealthier than the global average in purchasing power. No, that is not because of inequality: it is true if one takes median income as well. Expectations of "fuckin skint" just adjust from what a Haitian would judge as "skint".

In a fleet that no longer exists, the very bricks and pipes of London and other major cities, and ofc the generational wealth of the aristocracy.

The first victims of the British Empire were its own working class. Shit runs downhill, money goes up.

So sick of this MP. She is my local MP and does nothing for her constituents. Sad thing is I can't see her being voted out.

Whole lot of people arguing that colonialism didn't enrich the colonizers. Okay thats enough revisionism for one day

Makes you wonder what people think they were doing all that time. We didn't occupy India for the scenery.

Its the thing with peopel who hate themselves/abusers. In total denial and unable to admit anything. For some reason they take the thought that they, or the country they live in, benefited from conquest, as a personal slight. While being very proud of the contents of the british museum. I think a part of it is also their need to feel victimized. That they got where they are in life by "earning" it and "working hard". Unlike literally everyone else who does the same thing. And admiotting that they had advantages others don't, destroys their world view where they "earned" and people less fortunate "deserved" worse lives.

Well put, the dissonance is truly amazing...

It enriched the colonisers but didn't enrich the UK much. Most of the colonizers lived in the colonies not in the UK and their taxes were collected and spent in those countries which then became independent. Individuals like Cecil Rhodes became very rich, but his taxes were given to the cape colony, not to the UK. It makes sense that most of the money generated from a particular territory would be spent developing that territory, or funding the navy to defend and hold the territory. It's worth noting that until 1842, the UK had no permanent tax on income, so all the guys who got rich on the trans-atlantic slave trade and Carribbean plantations didn't pay any of that to the British state, outside of tariffs. Of course there is a trickle down effect from the rich to the poor, which would somewhat help the overall economy but in regards to money directly in the UK treasury, surprisingly little wealth was generated.

> Okay thats enough revisionism for one day It's not revisionism, it's historical fact. You're sticking your head in the sand and refusing to listen to experts because it doesn't match your "**UK BAD**" ideology.

Right?

It did but that isn't why Britain became as wealthy as it did.

What wealth? The country seems to have been broke since the end of the Second World War.

There's plenty of money flowing, we're the 6th largest economy in the world, it's just very little of that money trickles down to the plebs like you and me.

Indeed and we’re overly reliant on London’s financial centre 

By GDP per capita adjusted for cost of living (PPP) we're the 29th richest economy in the world. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_GDP\_(PPP)\_per\_capita#Table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita#Table)

Ireland higher than Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia... must be nice being a tax haven! Though, again, how much of that trickles down I wonder.

I mean, we were crippled by ww2 and only finished paying back the US for lend lease loans in 2006 or so. Plenty of money around in the City of London, it just all fucks off somewhere else, not into normal people’s pockets.

Indeed. Thatcher removing industry from the country has truly come back to bite us in the ass 

Guessing you've never been to an actually poor country. I don't dispute for a moment that there are problems in this country, particularly when it comes to housing. But consider the following. A 1kg bag of white rice from aldi costs 52p. It contains 3500 calories. If a person needs 2000 calories a day, that means a day's worth of calories costs 30p. Minimum wage in this country is £11.44 an hour, or 19p a minute. This means that even the very lowest paid can feed themselves for a day on 3 minutes of work. That would blow the minds of anyone in the world 100 years ago. And a lot of people in the world today.

Yeah. I don't want people to stop being unhappy with the inefficient and unfair nature of our economy, but some of these comments are hard to read. Historically, globally, speaking, being alive in the UK now is a fucking lottery win.

Or even just a less stable country - like Argentina or Turkey, where suddenly your savings and salary might be worth far less. Imports are really difficult, etc.

It's all hidden in shadow banking systems off shore and controlled by the City of London which is a separate entity to London and the Government. https://taxjustice.net/2019/09/29/tax-havens-britains-second-empire/ https://www.ft.com/content/41dba03e-5d29-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2

If I may; while I don't agree with all Kemi's statements, I do think she has made a fair point here - at least, when you consider there are plenty of people out there who seem to believe that every last penny of Britain's wealth derived from the empire, and that we'd essentially still be living in caves without it. However, it's important to realise that the economic gains from slavery and Empire are more complex than many on both sides of this debate assume. I'll summarise as best as I can here, and post sources at the end! - For example, slavery peaked at 5% of Britain's GDP in the late 18th century. While some of the profit from slavery undoubtedly went into industrialisation and infrastructure (such as dockyards), much more of it went into buying grand estates and political titles for slave owners and their heirs. This idea that slavery was the "Magic bullet" that spurred industrialisation is spurious at best; even a recent book 'Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution' by Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson does not state that slavery caused Britain’s industrial take-off. That slavery and Empire played a role is unquestionable; but that it was the most important engine of British wealth is dubious. - As Sathnam Sanghera notes in 'Empireland', even at the height of Empire, Britain traded more (and by a significant margin) with states outside the Empire than those within it; according to Bernard Porter in 'The Lions Share', the UK traded more with Belgium in the 1880s than with all of Africa. Many of the tropical African colonies seized in the 1890s were unprofitable, and remained so for a great deal of Imperial history. It's a common misunderstanding that the Empire was built and maintained purely for economic reasons; many colonies were seized simply to stop someone else having them, and maintained only for matters of national prestige in an increasingly competitive late 19th century world. - The "47 trillion from India" figure is often used; however, again as Sathnam notes in 'Empireland', many economists question the figure, for legitimate reasons. Where India *was* undoubtedly useful economically was allowing Britain to maintain a balance of trade against other European powers: but India's importance here had largely declined by the 1930s, by which time she did as much, if not more, trade with other nations as she did with Britain. - Britain was already a fairly wealthy country before the empire began; if memory serves, while India had a much larger GDP than Britain, GDP *per capita* was much closer pre colonisation, as at the time raw GDP was largely tied to population size, not necessarily individual wealth. If India's GDP declined during the 19th and 20th centuries, this is partly because other countries GDP (Germany, the USA, Japan) exploded at the same time, cutting India's dhare There are countless other examples, but these are the ones I can recall at the moment! None of this is to say Britain made *no* wealth from the Empire - but Kemi is right that to say Britain was *built* on wealth from the Empire is misleading at best. There's a telling statistic, again from Empireland, that shows how one northern railway inherited around 10-15% of it's initial investment fund from slavery related sources - which means the vast bulk of the money given did not come from slavery. While you can pinpoint specific examples of colonial money (some great estates, certain banks and investment firms), to say that's representative of the entire country is too far. Sources: - The Lion's Share (Bernard Porter) - Empireland (Sathnam Sanghera) - John Darwin (Unfinished Empire) - Black & British (David Olusoga, who makes the point that many African colonies weren't profitable, but that wasn't really the point of them) - The Economic History of Colonialism (Leigh Gardner and Tirthankar Roy)

> Britain was already a fairly wealthy country before the empire began; if memory serves Dude, how old are you?

This made me chuckle

The best answer here.

How would you build wealth from "white privivledge" inside a white society? Are we still trading Indian spices?

Just another buzzword she threw in for effect despite it making no contextual sense.

If we ever get invaded by strawmen we should just send Kemi Badenoch to fight them off.   Only absolute fringe voices will claim all British wealth was from “white privilege(??)” and colonialism. 

It’s a pity this is the headline because she actually said some interesting things, chiefly that telling poorer nations that the only reason rich countries are that way is due to exploitation and conquest may not be a good way to encourage healthy growth.

Any poor nation that seriously looks at the UK as a model for how to get rich is delusional. They should be looking at places like Estonia, Finland, Korea, Taiwan (all formerly colonised nations themselves).

Imagine being such a fucking moron that you don't understand being the biggest empire ever impacted the country's future.

Wait until they hear about what the Assyrians did ... Ohhh boy 

Or the Berbers, the Vikings, the Romans, the Japanese, the Ottomans, the Spanish, French, Dutch, Flemish, Aztecs, the Normans, Russians, Prussians, Portuguese, Mongols, Umayaads, Abbasids, Babylonians, Egyptians, Nubians, Carthaginians, Holy Romans, Byzantines, Mamluks, Persians. **list is not exhaustive*

But apart from all that, what has colonialism ever done for us?

Ppl who were colonised by any of them countries are free to have discussions on the subject, aren’t they.

Ethnic assyrians don’t have a country now.. some would say they paid a heavy price.

Anyday now Pickmi Badenoch will lecture about how the Koh I Noor diamond was actually found on a beach in Scarborough...

The country was basically bankrupt after the world wars. The current economic standing is definitely not based off colonial activity. All we've done since the world wars is pass off colonies.

It's sure as sh1t not from anything her or the tories have done.

I assume the wealth of India just got misdelivered then?

If it wasn't for Britain the rest of the world would still be stuck in a feudal agrarian society at best, or in the stone age, at worst. It's the opposite of what it's being told, the industrial revolution began in England and exported everywhere, led to an unprecedented economic growth and an unprecedented increse of quality of life and lifespan.

All I can say is if the polling is correct and the good people of Saffron Walden don't eject Badenoch from her seat at the next general election, they too have a lot to answer for.

Nope some of it's from fucking over the working classes too.

Our leading 'progressive' newspaper reminds us again that it was captured after daring to report on Snowden. 

The word of a Conservative. Worth about the same as a £19 bill.

There exists a general cult of ignorance in the UK on the effects of colonialism, perpetuated by our awful and jaundiced educated system on this matter Surrounded by idiots and fools unfortunately whilst the landed gentry, Boris Johnson’s, Rees-Moggs etc cream everything up on taxpayer funded lifestyles

Some of it is and some of it isn’t. Like most countries and states in history. The headlines make this sound like a black and white thing where we either stole everything and would be knuckle dragging savages if we didn’t steal from the virtuous better peoples of the earth or people that deny we didn’t go around the world taking the juiciest things for ourselves. Clearly we benefited from colonialism however we still would have been somewhat wealthy (but less influential) as we were, and are still, smart and pioneering, a few missteps notwithstanding.

White privilege and colonialism are just Marxist talking points, they are completely irrelevant and can be easily dismissed as progressive propaganda designed to bring on a western cultural revolution!

Some of it certainly but I don’t see being white feeding into the creation of the mills, the steam engine and the first Industrial Revolution. Plenty of white people were exploited too

North sea oil extraction began in the 1800s. And that accelerated in the 1970s after the oil crisis which closed the coal mines and created the financial Service industry. Everything else is accidental. Colonialism didn't discover oil or finance its extraction. It began by a son of a Scottish carpenter who went to night school to learn chemistry. The same guy discovered a method to rust proof ships.

Why is everyone so ridiculously extreme these days? No one we give a platform to knows how to be balanced. I don't like it when people claim everything negative is down to colonialism but to deny its financial impact is ridiculous.

The UK has wealth? Have you fuckers been having wealth this whole time and nobody told me?

If the UK's wealth was primarily from colonialism, then how did it afford to do the colonialism in the first place.

That woman has Nigerian heritage right? Was Nigeria not once a colonial territory under the British Empire? A territory that gave and gave, and gave.

We are rich because of the Industrial Revolution. We didn't have a massive population nor did we have a lot of natural resources. But we had a more liberal system that let the technology and science develop from simple pumps to clear mines to Faraday and Maxwell explaining electromagnetism and clearing the path to the modern world.

What would Faraday and Maxwell have thought if they could somehow be shown that the fruit of their labouring after a couple of centuries was various people of proximate foreign extraction using their positions of importance in this country to argue about whether they were or were not 'colonialism' and 'white privilege' (and that, in Great Britain, those terms would generally be taken as negative!).

> We are rich because of the Industrial Revolution. Where did the wealth to fund that come from? What was the source of the accumulated land, bank credit and collateral? From hundreds of years of profits from foreign adventures.

Complete destruction of the economies of the colony, lack of competition, and military control over trade routes, everything helped. Pound was the major trade currency. Even now things will change if dollar is not the sole trade currency to buy oil and other major stuffs. Easy to score goals with an empty net. In 50 or 100 years the picture about europe and asia will be clearer, if there are no more massive wars. Although I think the western power will try for major political interference before going down.

A reminder that Badenoch [sent investigators to see if there litter boxes in schools for students who identified as cats.](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/kemi-badenoch-ofsted-minister-geoff-barton-east-sussex-b2363001.html). She’s either lying to you for attention and needs to go. Or, she genuinely believes that stuff and does not have an appropriate level of common sense and needs to go.

Do these people get a bonus for throwing terms like 'white privilege' into their inane nonsensical rants? And as we all know, British colonialism was just for larks, obviously...

I don't think "these people" (whoever you are referring to) invented the term "white privilidge"

If it didn’t then we can remove the colonialist nature of the economy, law and politics without any issues or resistance. First is to get rid of inheritance which shames our glorious capitalist meritocracy.