[uniqueid]

  I sometimes consider the notion that, socially, 
  Western modernity was just reified feudalism: 
  everybody's a lord now!

I figure historians of the future will view it like this: there were people in Europe who practiced feudalism domestically for several centuries. Eventually they developed the technology to outsource serfdom to the rest of the world.

For most of my life, people in the 'third world' lived in barely imaginable poverty while the rest of the world walked off with oil, lumber, precious metals, gems, historical artifacts, slave labor, etc. I was well out of highschool before I appreciated the connection between the squalor elsewhere, and the four or five previous centuries of pillaging that contributed to it.

That unpleasant state of affairs tempers my ability to feel triumphalist about 'first-world' nations ridding themselves of feudalism.

[SpicyLemonZest]

If you're thinking that global poverty was invented by European exploitation, you're pretty severely overcorrecting. For most of history, the vast majority of people were even poorer than what we call "barely imaginable poverty" today.

[uniqueid]

That way of looking at things is mostly wrong, but it is a belief that suited the winners, so it is a wide-spread belief.

I'm not keen to rebut it at much length because my previous comment already leaves the wrong impression: my point is less about the morality of the past few hundred years than the stupidity of the narrative we built around it.

If I did expand on things, I'd list off the usual examples (Conquistadors and gold, Chinese opium trade, slaughter of native Americans, ad nauseum).

I don't know how to make those points without sounding like I'm appealing to emotion. The actual point is that - though the Steven Pinkers and Hans Roslings might disagree - people subject to those conditions clearly are worse-off than before (and than today, compared to the nations who plundered them).

To the original point of the thread, the colonial powers attained such obscene wealth (ie: by stealing gold, oil, farming cotton with slave labor, etc) that even the poorest among us, until the past decade, was rich compared to the rest of the world.

[SpicyLemonZest]

My concern is that people tend to lean into the "noble savage" trope; I've seen a lot of people who imply or outright state that wars of conquest are a uniquely European concept. But I do agree with the narrative issue you're pointing at. It's wrong to see colonial-era violence and oppression as a side show to the "main plot" of history, especially given that the majority of the global population was on the receiving end of it.

[uniqueid]

Well, that seems perfectly reasonable to me. Just to clarify, I don't think I'm particularly prone to romanticize societies that Europeans colonized.

What changed my view about the world is thinking about the economics.

Take the US, for example. In the popular imagination, the success of America is all about entrepreneurial spirit, etc etc. But the other aspect is... four million square miles of (in a manner of speaking) undeveloped land! Entrepreneurial spirit is great, but literally having more natural resources than you know what to do with (didn't get around to developing California till the 1900s, for example) seems at least as important.

Given the past several centuries were a free-for-all for nations with empires, it doesn't surprise me that the colonized societies, whatever their inherent strengths and weaknesses, wound up in bad shape.