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My own opinion?

I don't believe people or nations should receive any sort of monetary reparations. I think there are far better ways to do this sort of thing.

For instance, if we know that, say, ex French colonies had slaves taken away from them and those who remained were obliged to pay onerous taxes to France, fine. If that is proved in a court of law, which would be a mere formality in the case of most French colonies, particularly the African ones, then we relax WTO rules on these colonies so they can build their internal markets. Same would apply to any former colony of any former colonial power. (It should have to be people based harm though, not monetary. So not, "the Dutch West India company gave me 23 beads for the Island of Manhattan." That's just a bad business deal that you shouldn't have accepted. But if the Dutch East India company rounded you up, shipped you to Cuba and forced you to work the Sugar plantations, that's a whole different story.)

Such former colonies should be able to be in WTO even if they have rules about domestic ownership percentages of businesses. Just prove the harm to your people.

Problem solved.

You want money? Great! There's your opportunity to make money on the global market with your own resources and efforts, and at a favorable rate to your own people to boot.

It's also hard to make a strong case for it not being a significant factor, even with cherry picking.

In any case, even if killing someone's family members just so happened to help increase their country's GDP in the long run, that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be compensated the killing of their family.

When thinking about what we "should" do here, we're really just thinking about what policies would create the most ideal incentives in service of creating a better world in the long run.

Amsterdam has a museum on how Dutch activities in their colonies financed the expansion of the city and the construction of the canals.

> we should study Lithuania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Duchy_of_Lithuania

Germany had colonies. East European countries are not rich. East India Company was the most profitable corporation in the history of humanity. It accumulated the wealth much greater than any of the current corporations. And contemporary corporations wealth is mostly ones and zeroes increased arbitrarily with ever increasing speed.

Germany had a few overseas colonies, late in the game. And boy did they resent it.

Eastern Europe is not as rich as the west, but is not all that far behind -- Poland has the GDP that the UK had in about 1987 (says google). And of course got deeply massively trodden on in a way that certainly wasn't colonialism, rather more recently than most ex-colonies.

The East India companies were indeed large for their time, the biggest companies ever until canals & railways got invented. But it's hard to comprehend how small the scale of commerce was then, the sum of all long-distance trade was a few containers. Enough to make a few well-positioned men very wealthy indeed, they built some nice mansions. But not countries.

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

> Many countries without an extensive history of colonialism have achieved the similar prosperity to the great European colonial powers

That only makes it worse.

> Hard to make the case that colonialism is the sole or principal factor that produced the prosperity of any of these countries.

If I make 300k a year via human trafficking can I then point towards a doctor also making 300k and say "see, that means I didn't make my money through human trafficking!"

> But if it is true that Portugal (23k) is an evil white supremacist economy and Lithuania (23k) is a virtuous economy, we should study Lithuania! Great job lads!

Now you make it a race thing when nobody else has even mentioned race.

> Does the Republic of Ireland (#4 per capita GDP) need to pay for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

I can't see any way you could make a case for that. What's next, making Israel pay Germany?

> Is the Ottoman Empire also very bad? Do the Turks need to pay up? The colonialism people seem to pass over them for some reason.

Nobody in this thread has mentioned Turkey but you. Seems like you want to make this a racial thing.

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. Swerving into personal attack is particularly not ok. I'm sure you can make your substantive points thoughtfully, so please do that instead in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Where are the personal attacks?

"Nobody in this thread has mentioned Turkey but you. Seems like you want to make this a racial thing."

(Incidentally, at least two commenters mentioned Turkey.)