I suppose it depends on how one defines a generation - I look at the change in the general status of the overseas Chinese as a phenomenon that I can perceive as happening, for the most part, within my lifetime.
The truly interesting aspect of it is not that there have always been wealthy Chinese merchants, but that the mass of this population, formerly poor as dirt, is no longer poor. This change only happened in the last fifty-sixty years.
I know the overseas Chinese case intimately. When my father (class of 54) went to engineering school in Manila, nearly all his classmates were Filipinos. When I went to the same school (class of 82) nearly all were Chinese. My classmates fathers nearly all started as garbage-pickers, tinkers, street vendors, and the like. When I was little you could still find rickshaws in Manilas Chinatown, a job no Filipino will do; it seems that today it may be impossible to find a poor Chinese in Manila. I find this astonishing.
The same thing happened in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, over the same period and to about the same degree. Economic policy and social-political conditions and policies vis-a-vis the Chinese, ranging even to overt persecution, varied greatly in all these places over that post-war period. But yet the Chinese succeeded in all of them. This also is astonishing.
Probably the three main expat groups worldwide that prosper in host nations are:
Arab Christians
Sephardic Jews
Ethnic Chinese
They run commerce in the Caribbean basin for all intensive purposes