[eesmith]

I think it's appropriate to wonder why the article uses that picture - Dam Square with the New Town Hall under Construction (1656) by Johannes Lingelbach - to illustrate European wealth, without mentioning where the money used to build the town hall came from.

That scene was during the Dutch Golden Age, in the era of the Dutch East India Company ("The prosperity gained from this was accompanied by horrors against the local population. For example, in 1621, Jan Pieterszoon Coen had almost all the inhabitants of the Banda Islands massacred." quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Golden_Age), and Dutch involvement in the slave trade ("It is estimated that more than 550,000 people were brought to America in slavery by Dutch ships" and "Asian slaves were also traded extensively. The slave was indispensable in the economy of the Dutch colonial empire in the Golden Age as a labor force; in the second half of the seventeenth century, half of the inhabitants of Batavia were unfree", ibid).

Certainly a good fraction of Dutch power came from "exploiting and pillaging colonies" and slavery.

I therefore find it odd that the text doesn't mention those components of European wealth. Don't you?

While your point might be valid, it's rather irrelevant to the author's thesis, which specifically concerns "The Great Enrichment" of the 18th century, with no mention of why Portugal, for example, was able to conquer Goa in 1510 and Malacca the next year.