"We plundered billions upon billions in wealth from you, but it's old now, tainted by magic history and colonial ownership dust, so it would be wrong for you to have any of it back" is by far my favorite dispute claim between civilizations.
It doesn't appear any plundering happened in this case, but remember, gold coins are not useful, you can't eat them and they don't actually make a country rich. Colonialism and imperialism are and were not profitable.
This one was on the way to being plundered by Spanish imperialism - you'll note Spain is not a rich country. This happened because of a variant of the "resource curse"; it's hard to develop a country if it's too based on natural resources, whether they're yours or your colonies'.
Also, there were straight up no rich countries before 1900, so we know nothing anyone did before that works for becoming rich.
(There are probably a few exceptions; the biggest one is land, which can't be replaced and so actually is valuable to steal, and that is part of how the US and Australia became rich countries.)
That “conservative” assumption of a continuous, uninterrupted 5% interest rate over hundreds of years seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting in that 45 trillion figure.
I don’t follow this logic, it seems to say Bill Gates is poor because he can’t buy a whizbang from the year 3,000. That doesn’t make sense.
Also Irish were way poorer than English during the height of England colonial empire and in a large part due to the colonization - I.e. Britain was literally taking wheat from Ireland when Irish were starving and fleeing to America.
Please stop making up stuff or just saying random words not grounded in any facts.
> I don’t follow this logic, it seems to say Bill Gates is poor because he can’t buy a whizbang from the year 3,000. That doesn’t make sense.
That's correct, he would not be rich in year 3000 dollars if he can't afford the year 3000 equivalent of CPI. We'll have to wait until then to see how his investments do.
> Also Irish were
"Were". I didn't say "were", I said "are".
> Please stop making up stuff or just saying random words not grounded in any facts.
How about trying harder to read what I actually said?
The comment talked about how much wealth a Victorian would need to buy a flu vaccine. You’re talking past history buying present items. It makes no sense.
Wait you’re talking present day Ireland?! seriously jumping to present day Ireland to say past colonialism didn’t benefit England in the past.
Wow this logic is so broken it’s not possible to fix.
> You’re talking past history buying present items. It makes no sense.
The past causes the present. You can only get the present economy by developing in the past.
> seriously jumping to present day Ireland to say past colonialism didn’t benefit England in the past.
I did not use the word "benefit". I said it didn't make them rich. I don't care if it made English people slightly less miserably poor; that still makes it a bad idea because of opportunity costs from eg your sailors all dying of scurvy when they could've been inventing handwashing and toothpaste.
Though if English colonialism of Ireland results in one of them being richer than the other, that does not mean it was good for England. It can be negative-sum, and so it was.
If you like the classics, there were two guys named Karl Marx and Adam Smith who wrote books on how England became (relatively) wealthy, and neither of them thought it was colonialism.
In the modern age you can see nobody thinks it's a good idea because nobody does it.
Thanks for the corrections, It’s nice to know the English were starving the Irish and subjugating India purely for fun and games not for any material gain.
Marx specifically wrote about English colonisation of Ireland - and apparently had a whole other set of 20,000 print page long notebooks on such matters that never made it into the standard "Big Books of Marx".
Many other British historians are happy to go on at length about the wealth England extracted from India and elsewhere making the trading classes and adventurers the (relative) uber billionaires of their day with vast estates and fabulous gardens, etc.
> it wasn't good for anything, as they aren't any richer now.
No such thing as a pendulum because they swing back?
Seems a very flawed position given the well documented wealth and power of the British Empire upon which once the sun never set.
Like the USofA and every other country peak positions never last, but we don't therefore claim that they never existed, and the wealth is never evenly distributed, what varies are parameters of the curve of wealth distribtion.
> No such thing as a pendulum because they swing back?
Wouldn't call it swinging back when nobody went back. They weren't replaced by another empire and didn't become poorer. Everyone instead became richer so fast that various bad ideas of the past were simply irrelevant.
> Seems a very flawed position given the well documented wealth and power of the British Empire upon which once the sun never set.
It's like "history is written by the victors"; don't believe them just because they liked to talk about it.
Note, most things they'd like to claim are wealth end up being a drag economically because of capitol depreciation - ie, if you can afford to pay for a giant mansion, now you have to pay to maintain it forever.
> the wealth is never evenly distributed, what varies are parameters of the curve of wealth distribtion.
No, my point is total wealth matters. You can grow your way out of inequality, and you will, that's why creating more inequality is a waste of time.
The transistor or vaccine argument is a poor argument because no one during Victorian era was able to purchase that.
One looks instead relative to other countries in the same time frame, to ask if a country is richer or poorer.
In this case, England was an absolute super power at the height of having India as a colony. They were much richer than the Irish, Finns, and Swiss when India was part of the English empire. Moreover, Englands wealth was directly increased by owning major colonies around the world.
You cannot eat gold, but you can reliably exchange it for goods and services.
> The transistor or vaccine argument is a poor argument because no one during Victorian era was able to purchase that.
Yes, in other words they were all miserably poor and nothing they invented was capable of changing that. If you can't purchase a $1 2023 product with your colony that's an enormous opportunity cost that could've been spent staying home and inventing it.
> In this case, England was an absolute super power at the height of having India as a colony.
And they were all poorer than the poorest modern person alive.
> You cannot eat gold, but you can reliably exchange it for goods and services.
If you discover more gold you can't reliably exchange it; you may just get inflation because its value relies on there being a fixed amount of it.
England got a little rich through trade networks, but it's the ability to trade that makes you rich, and notably going to another country and taking all their gold and leaving is not trading with them and doesn't develop your economy.
Funny enough, the reason Scotland is part of the UK is that they bankrupted themselves doing colonialism and sold themselves to England. And now neither of them are richer than countries that never tried it.
Not being able to buy a $1 2023 product does not mean the poorest of the poor in 2023 would be richer than the richest in olden times.
Rockefeller and Carnegie were (and still is) absolutely richer than most people today even though they were not able to buy a transistor with their wealth at the time. Because what money can buy is a high dimensional problem, and focusing on goods that didn’t exist back then is myopic and ignores that money can be used to establish endowments.
The funds from Rockefeller (resource extraction), Carnegie (steel), or from English army (plundering) directly contributed to the large endowments of many of the wealthiest research institutes today.
So colonialism, plundering, and resource extraction is unambiguously profitable by increasing absolute wealth (by taking goods) and increasing innovative activity (by funding institutes).
> The funds from Rockefeller (resource extraction), Carnegie (steel), or from English army (plundering) directly contributed to the large endowments of many of the wealthiest research institutes today.
Spain, Portugal, Mongolia and Russia should have a lot of them then. And Korea, Switzerland and Germany shouldn't, as none of them were big colonizers.
"Endowments" meaning successful very long running investments, most of all requires something to invest in, which is economic development. Harvard doesn't sit on a big pile of gold.
> So colonialism, plundering, and resource extraction is unambiguously profitable by increasing absolute wealth (by taking goods)
However, it may not really be taking it, because we also don't observe that the colonized countries are poorer due to losing resources sometime before 1900. Rather, having a lot of natural resources is usually bad for your development ("resource curse") but some countries like Australia and Norway have avoided it through good institutions.
