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Comment by ein0p | Hacker News Reader

Really? You’re going to claim that the prosperity of Britain did not come from systematically plundering the rest of the world? Is this what you’re going to go with as your counterpoint?

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It didn't. It came from the Industrial Revolution and a step change in the productivity of british society. Many economic studies have shown that the "Empire" and especially parts of it like India, the African colonies etc were a net negative to Britain economically speaking. This should not be surprising - just as Afghanistan or Iraq were a net negative to the US more recently, but still allowed certain segments of US society (the military industrial complex) to enrich themselves at the expense of other parts.

Probably in 50 or 100 years there will be some Afghan nationalist movement which will be telling everyone that the entirety of US wealth is based on plunder of Afghanistan. That's roughly how it is with India nationalists and Britain today, but of course, it is nonsense.

>Really? You’re going to claim that the prosperity of Britain did not come from systematically plundering the rest of the world?

I think the OP's question is how did Britain get it a position where it had the capability to "systematically plunder the rest of the world"?

Do you think that was luck? Were the British simply "evil", and everyone else not so? One has to assume they were already high-functioning, prior to the plundering.

British empire sucked until Spanish got so rich they basically destroyed their economy

I never claimed it was luck. I merely pointed out the mechanism of acquiring the riches. Eg most people in the US have no idea much of the East Coast was built with money from the Chinese opium trade, and how many of our “elites” got their start as basically drug cartel members. There’s lots of this in the history of any empire. You just have to dig a little - the empires don’t like to talk about how they made their first trillion

In the case of Britain, it was the following (and more):

- be colonised by the Romans 2000 years ago

- spend the next 1000 years rediscovering and (eventually) surpassing the Romans' achievements

- invest heavily in education (when the Incas were building their monuments, most of Oxford University had already been constructed) and subsequently have 1000 years of cumulative effect of those investments

- be highly connected to Western Europe, with all the continual advancements shared between countries all trying to outdo each other

- be an island nation, with a seafaring tradition that was accelerated by all of the above to the point of being the best in the world

You missed the part when they shoot cannonballs through the chests of Indians for not paying enough taxes

That happened after they got powerful. It is like the Mongol invasions of Europe and China, they didn't become powerful from those invasions those invasions happened since they were powerful.

Do you believe that just no one thought to "plunder" other places? Think about what enabled the British to go afar and make an empire. The ability came before the empire.

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