Obviously it was their fine cuisine...................
Agreed. To paraphrase the well known quote about the left is that at the heart of their outlook and behaviour is their need to emote as opposed to thinking and understanding.
It costs a lot of money to run an empire.
Many of the beneficiaries of the empire are the common people.
They benefit through trade, suppression of tribal wars, enforcement of laws against murder, theft, etc.
Essentially, enforcement of the rule of law benefits the large mass of people.
After feudalism waned in Europe, the obsession with owning land didn’t. Land is power. Today, money is the prime symbology for status and power, but you have to think how things used to be. I think “colonialism” was a manifestation of the powerful elite land owning classes wanting to expand their wealth.
Britain became wealthy because of the Jewel in the Crown, the East India Company, and then India as a Crown Colony. Slavery to sustain the colonies with ports needed to protect the SLOCs to India were part of that. It was a whole system. At the same time a lot of the people subsumed into the colonies were a whole lot better off because justice was administered using British Common law which was far superior to anything else in the world and geve the subjects, forced or unforced, much more personal security than the arbitrary and capricious arrangements elsewhere. It is noteworthy that one of the features of the modern US administrative state is the effort to uttelry undermine and discplace the common law to make government about the adminstrative state vs the people with the administrative state superior as opposed to just the King’s Justice in settling disputes between subjects equitably. Decriminalization of felonies against persons is antoher aspect of that abandonment of justice for the people.
Not sure about this one. Calculating the gains of trade can be difficult.
Kristian Niemietz is 100% correct. Good research that should be publicized widely.
Western prosperity was due to free enterprise capitalism, education, and science, not slavery. Marxist historians want blacks to believe that, without slavery and colonialism, Europeans would be living like Africans lived before slavery and colonialism.
the great benefit of colonialism was the spread of the English language and English legal system
Slavery is a failed economic system. It has no inherent advantages towards production or investment. Besides a few old buildings or graves from some long-dead empire, it leaves nothing.
That’s why the claim it “built” the American south was wrong. it was actually the reason for the destruction of the American south.
Once capitalism and property rights came along, slavery was dead.
Yea. Add in the continued costs of caretaking and policing the lawless, aimless descendants of the slaves and were definitely operating at a loss.
Of course it didn’t. That is why Britain destroyed European slavery in the 1940’s. Not slavery in general. The Muslims in Africa still captured slaves and sold them, just not to whites from Europe.
This is a really old conclusion. My chancellor at UC-Santa Barbara, economist Robert Huttenback, published “Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire” which proved this back in 1984.