Quite funny: you're more describing the US than Europe. Maybe because you're only interested by US and not by Europe..?
;-)
Europe got its most of the pre-industrial era wealth from plundering nations of South Asia and Africa.
Winners write history, but still, it's damn too hard to make elephant in the room disappear.
Do you have some data to back it up? Because there are some quite prominent examples that seem to contradict this claim. Take Poland, which was one of the major powers of the pre-industrial Europe (around XV-XVII centuries), and which never ventured outside Europe.
>> Take Poland, which was one of the major powers of the pre-industrial Europe (around XV-XVII centuries), and which never ventured outside Europe.
It seems to support my claim perfectly. Poland was only able to become a major power because it did not have an excess of those resources, partly because it did not venture outside Europe. It had no option but to polish its industrial strength in order to compete with rest of Europe.
There was literally no incentive for other European countries of that time to become a major industrial power, they were awash with wealth and resources.
Polish living standards in the sixteenth century were below those of Italy and The Netherlands but on par with those of England. The author demonstrated that the Polish series began to also lag behind the English values in the seventeenth century due to growth in the latter series. According to a study of GDP made by Wójtowicz and Wójtowicz (2009), people living in Poland enjoyed only around 70 % of the goods and services available to the inhabitants of Western Europe in the sixteenth century. This value declined to around 40 % in the late eighteenth century
source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11698-016-0154-5