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Your argument - "[t]his is a deeply imperialist, Euro/Anglo-centric viewpoint" - is deeply lazy. You should be easily rebut the their points if the article is bad.

If anything - your arguments actually reinforce the article's point of view because resource heavy areas get pilfered by others and the victors often place or leave extractive institutions in these areas, thus leading to poor economies. Countries that have winters have incentives to colonize resource-rich areas for the reasons you cite. If these resource rich areas have the advantage of having resources... then why is it that these areas are often colonized instead of the other way around?

Also - the article presents these arguments because they're simply sourcing arguments from Daron Acemoglu, who is a labor economist from MIT. Therefore, it will be written from a developmental economics point of view, not from political economics.

>In a just world, Spain, Portugal, the UK, France, the US, and the Benelux countries would collectively be forced to pay reparations amounting to about five to ten trillion euros/pounds/dollars per annum to their ex-colonies, slaves, and exploited peoples until the latter returned to a semblance of development with everyone above the poverty line, and with reliable electricity, sanitation, food supply, housing, and Internet access.

You're not wrong for wanting reparations but this argument has nothing to do with the article at hand.

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The Spanish expansion has sometimes been succinctly summed up as being motivated by "gold, glory, God", that is, the search for material wealth, the enhancement of the conquerors' and the crown's position, and the expansion of Christianity to the exclusion of other religious traditions.

The linear approach to the origins of a Reconquista taken in early twentieth-century historiography is complicated by a number of issues. [.. etc.] The period is seen today to have had long episodes of relative religious coexistence and tolerance. The idea of a continuous Reconquista has been challenged by modern scholars. The consolidation of the modern idea of a "Reconquista" is inextricably linked to the foundational myths of Spanish nationalism in the 19th century, associated with the development of a Centralist, Castilian, and staunchly Catholic brand of nationalism, evoking nationalistic, romantic and sometimes colonialist themes.