[Aromasin]

Agreed. I just finished reading "the English and their history" by Robert Tombs, along with many of the references he uses, and I was frankly shocked at how little revenue from the colonial era was generated abroad. I highly recommend the book to everyone.

All of my modern education left me with the idea that we, like postit mentions, had squeezed every colonial nation for everything it was worth and left nothing but husks; producing little to nothing of value ourselves. In actual fact, with the exception of British India in the 1700/1800s, the revenue made from colonies was a fraction of a percentage of Britain's GDP. The same can be said of much of Europe.

Europeans became and stayed wealthy by producing goods internally and trading between themselves, and England particularly by the invention of steam power, mechanised factories, improved tooling, and better iron and chemical processes. It's difficult to fathom in the modern era such a technological leap.

[jl6]

If a European country created wealth in its factories, but those factories used slave-grown inputs (cotton, sugar, whatever) imported from colonies, would that count as wealth produced internally?

[throwaway4aday]

Even with cotton being produced via slave labour in the Americas, textiles produced from it were still in stiff competition with textiles produced in India at the time. That competition led to the investment in labour saving machinery that continued to fuel the industrial revolution. Slave labour is not a magic ingredient that makes economies flourish, if anything it's probably a drag on those economies.

> Indian cotton textiles, mainly those from Bengal, continued to maintain a competitive advantage up until the 19th century. In order to compete with Indian goods, British merchants invested in labour-saving technical advancements, while the government implemented protectionist policies such as bans and tariffs to restrict Indian imports.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_manufacture_during_the...

[ethbr0]

The revolutionary nature of certain advances seems underappreciated in histories.

You could have been the most scientifically advanced culture in the world for centuries (see: 8th - 14th century Islamic world), yet missed out on being so for a few key inventions and lost most of the benefit.