Yeah um, the British Empire? Anybody?
A small island off the coast of Europe got VERY RICH off of imperialism.
A small island off the coast of Europe got VERY RICH off of imperialism.
The broader enrichment of the British people was kicked off by something different, namely the industrial revolution. Spain and Portugal didn't have those and the average person there remained bitterly poor until deep into the 20th century.
It’s mildly controversial, but I really like Buñuel’s Tierra Sin Pan (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Without_Bread). Honestly I never thought that level of poverty existed in Western Europe even in the 1930’s.
Here is a graph of their GDP per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-in-the-uk-...
There is definitely some increase, but it really kicks up in 1800s and 1900s, with the industrial revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India_under_the_Bri...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison?t...
So maybe England was keeping India poor but that wasn't what made England rich.
The only way GDP is can be useful if we say that by wealth we mean GDP, but then we've just made the word wealth as useless as the GDP metric.
In the case of countries, our modern intuitive understanding of wealth is pretty much "how hard does a person in this country have to work in relation to how well they live" - at least that's what countries nowadays are optimizing for. A country in which <40 hour work-weeks are the norm, in which almost everyone can afford yearly week-long vacations, which has good infrastructure, as well as affordable high-quality services, food and goods, you'd probably call rich. That's just not something GDP tells you in a vacuum.
Often when looking back at the time of empires, our understanding of wealth becomes "how much actual wealth have the rulers of this country managed to accumulate", which is also not something GDP measures very well.