[abecedarius]

When people assert that extractive empires, which go back to the beginning of civilization, are the "driving force" behind the order-of-magnitude per-capita wealth increase of the last couple of centuries -- and often put it like it needs no argument -- that's what struck me as odd when I first started seeing this claim a lot in recent years.

(I agree the sins of the colonizers and their role in European growth are worth talking about, of course. But the view where they were obviously the key factor behind a phase change in the rate of progress now shared with the majority of the world, that's really alien. I guess we both find each other odd.)

[zeteo]

European growth was propelled by a diversity of extracted resources. Previous empires extracted mostly food. A system such as the Dutch East Indies in the 1600s, where the natives were forced to neglect growing food for themselves and tend to the production of spices instead (to be sold halfway across the world) [1], would have been completely out of place as the way to run a province of the Roman or the Ottoman Empire. Another example is that the Indians were forced to stop producing their own textiles ("calicoes" that were quite popular on the world market) in order to buy inferior English products instead (for which they would ship the raw cotton); again, something never encountered at this scale in the classical or medieval worlds [2].

[1] https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstr...

[2] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w10586/w105...