My wife is Chinese and she was taught in the 80s that the reason the UK is richer than China was that 100 earlier before we stole their best stuff.
Yes these thefts did happen, our big trading companies were basically organised piracy and extortion. There is an argument that we're still benefiting from investments in infrastructure and social development back then.
That's not why anyone in London today earns more for similar work than people in China or Africa though. You can't apply that argument to say Japan, South Korea or Taiwan for example, or to China today. 20 years ago the Chinese taxi driver would have earned 1/10th of the London taxi driver. Now it's 1/4. Britain burning down the Summer Palace in the 1860s is just not a factor in the reasons for why it used to be 1/10th in 2000 or is now 1/4.
It definitely is the reason why. Part of what sets compensation in London is the cost of real estate, and those prices have their origins in the stolen wealth.
Property values have risen 30x in the last century in PPP terms. Colonialism might have had an impact on the starting value back then, but the other 97% of the current value was accumulated since then and came from somewhere else.
If you think the UK has an advanced economy due to 19th century colonialism you then need to explain the development of countries like Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Japan went from feudal backwater to major global power in 80 years, and it completed that transformation 80 years ago. If you don't believe the UK did anything worthwhile in the last century to earn it's way and is free riding on the profits from stolen Zimbabwean tobacco from 1910, ok fine, now explain Japan.
Sure, the UK has certainly not been free riding from its profits. But the UK wouldn't be nearly as rich as it is now without the initial investment that came from plundering colonies. Innovation doesn't come for free, wealth is needed to finance it. People say the physical resources that were stolen don't matter, but that's absolutely not true, they matter a lot, even to this day (see how the media is talking about the Taliban sitting on trillions of dollars of minerals in Afghanistan).
For example, if not for India, Britain would be absolutely destroyed after WW2 and would be far from their current position in the 21st century (assuming allies still somehow win, big if). India was Britain's cash cow and is the reason why it survived the war.
We did very well out of plundering colonies, yes, to our shame. I don't think it has any relevance to our economy now though. Compare us to Germany, Austria and Sweden. They never had significant empires. Do you think we would be massively poorer now compared to those countries if we hadn't had the Empire? Is the only reason we can compete with them now the fact that until the 1950s we had India?
Germany put the lie to imperial supremacy in 1940 when they comprehensively but-kicked France and Britain. They proved that industrialisation is what mattered and by then imperial mercantilism was a distraction. We were only saved by the English channel, and yes thanks to India. The fact we had India undoubtedly saved us, but in a last ditch final card up our sleeve that kept us in the game kind of way. Not in a trump card that meant Germany never had a chance from the start kind of way.
Industrialism originally developed through the profits of export goods, directed at the colonies.
By the 20th century, I think you could say colonialism didn't pay off. But it was also the seed capital for a lot of europe's industrialization. The same thing happened with Japan - their defeat of China in the Sino-Japanese war resulted in an indemnity that underwrote the Mejji restoration.
Most exports of industrial goods went to other developed countries. Also as I pointed out, many developed countries didn't have colonies at all to export to and did fine.
As for Japan, they did do well out of the war, but they were already rapidly industrialising at a much faster pace than their neighbours. That's why the won the war in the first place. The scale of the reparations might optimistically have paid for a few years of industrialisation and investment, but over the 4 decades between then and the next Sino-Japanese war that's basically a marginal difference. The second Sino-Japanese war merged right into WW2 so was too late to have any major effects on overall national development.
Not really. The japanese ships were, iirc, mostly built in britain and germany. Plus, the chinese had many more ships. I've read that corruption and morale were important factors, but I don't think relative levels of industrialization mattered that much. Bear in mind, Japan did not build things like engines domestically until the 20th century.
Further, the indemnity was nearly four times the annual national budget, and paid in pound sterling. That's more than a 'few years'. That's absolutely transformative. Not to mention the capture of chinese naval vessels, territorial concessions, etc.
> Most exports of industrial goods went to other developed countries.
Depends on the era. The basic point I'm making is that early industrialization, i.e. the wool trade, then the cotton trade, were generally export-driven, and export-driven to west africa. The cotton industry was also underwritten by colonialism insofar as it was predicated on slavery.
Pointing to countries that did not have direct roles in colonialism (although a surprising number of countries you wouldn't think of actually did - i.e. demmark in the slave trade) ignores the fact that colonialism basically amounted to a massive and sustained cash infusion into western europe. The spanish conquests of the new world, for example, brought so much gold and silver into europe they crashed the spanish economy, but I think it's obvious that this gold would have quickly escaped national borders and funded colonial and industrial ventures across western europe.
Yes japan had more modern ships and crews with the technical skills to crew them, and the infrastructure to deploy them effectively. They were very rapidly modernising in ways that China simply wasn't. Those reparations figures are wildly overestimated, the cost of the war to Japan was estimated at about half of the reparations for example.
Looking at Britain, most of the imperial revenue flowed to the gentrified classes and into their estates. The industrialisers were mainly middle class domestic manufacturers and it's the growing friction between these two sides of the economy that drove political conflict and reform in Britain.
Most of Europe had no third world empire. As I pointed out, Germany proved conclusively that Empire was irrelevant. Spain and Portugal had huge Empires and just fizzled out because they didn't industrialise. France also failed to capitalise on Empire in ways that mattered long term.
China also has industrialised rapidly over several decades, and their imperial assets in Tibet and Xinjiang played no significant role in this. What matters is policy and economic culture. This is what distinguishes say Israel from it's neighbours. They're similar sizes, similar resources but night and day in terms of development.
> Those reparations figures are wildly overestimated
I feel like I'm understating them. I'm getting my overview of the amounts from this paper[0], but in principle, even getting paid a part of the costs of a war is a very good deal, because that money usually goes entirely to your own economy (since they are supplying your military), you get essentially free training for your military, you get prestige, and you get the actual war aims (in this case, control over Korea, which is in itself lucrative).
If you consider another colonial war, the second opium war, the chinese government indemnity in this case didn't cover the costs of the expedition (iirc). However, it's still a really great deal, because you get access to the chinese market, which is worth a ton, and the state finances themselves aren't negatively impacted because the indemnity is enough to cover costs.
I think it's probably true that by the time Germany reunified, empires weren't always that worthwhile.
I don't totally disagree with your culture idea. I just think there's nothing worse for a nation's political culture than being colonized, and it's also terrible for the economy, so it's unsurprising that almost every first world nation was either never colonized, or if it was, is currently ruled by a seceeding group of the colonizers themselves (e.g. the USA).
> Japan went from feudal backwater to major global power in 80 years, and it completed that transformation 80 years ago
Japan achieved this by looking to countries like England as an example and becoming an imperialist and colonizing parts of Southeast Asia - kicking out some of the European countries who held those colonies in the process.
So yea they did the same thing to get wealthy - stealing resources.
Japanese expansionism was enabled by their industrialisation, not a cause of it. Yes they wanted access to resources, but it would have been dramatically cheaper to just buy them than incur the massive costs of conquest. They expanded because they thought that's what you do to succeed, but as the post war period has shown that's just not the case and never was. Anyway the war wiped them out, there's no way any benefits of their territorial expansionism before the war carried over into the post-war period.
Look at Germany, they never had any significant empire, but they still brought rest of Europe including the imperial powers to their knees in 1940. That conflict showed that the imperial mercantilism of the previous centuries just wasn't relevant anymore.
If imperialism was so great, there's no way Germany should have conceivably been able to roll over the imperial superpowers of France and Britain. The only thing that saved the UK was the English Channel. What mattered was industrialisation, along with economic and financial liberalisation. Every country that has done well in the last 100 years, except a few resource states like those in OPEC, has done so this way.
> but the other 97% of the current value came from somewhere else.
It the value literally came from somewhere else (geographically), funneled through the financial district and spread to the local economy. London is the bay area, but for bankers.
The City of London has been laundering money for centuries. Lately, there's a lot of Russian/former soviet oligarch money sloshing about, and the Square Mile doesn't ask too many questions about source of funds. Not too long ago, HSBC was slapped on the wrist for laundering cartel money.
"Lately, there's a lot of Russian/former soviet oligarch money sloshing about".
This keeps getting brought up but it's inconsequential at the scale of the total economy. As I pointed out elsewhere already on this thread, total Russian inward flows to this country accounts for about 1% of foreign investment. Now yes absolutely, foreign investment is a significant factor in the UK economy, about 20%. That makes a big difference, but Russian oligarch funds are not a significant part of that, they're just a politically and socially highly visible one that gets talked about a lot.
The reason London is a centre for laundering money is that it's a massive mainstream finance centre. So yes, you're on the right track, but you're obsessing over a small forest footpath and missing the mainstream economic motorway right next to it.
US FDI into the UK is more than 30x that from Russia. That from the EU is even bigger. This is the stuff that moves the needle.
To be fair, quite a lot of the London wealth more recently has been stolen by Russians, or is the rightful property of murderous feudal monarchs in the middle east. We're an equal opportunity laundry.
Being essentially a colonial slave does not help at all increase labour productivity, nor valorizing labour. Having no ownership of the capital your labour is used into doesn't help.
From that on you can very easily get a 100 year setback economically. Then you have to play catch-up economically. That's where the social dysfunction, literal assasinations, and ethnic regimentation kick in :)
Sure it's not 100% about colonialism, but that's the deciding factor.
All the countries doing well today either were historically imperial, ie., most of Europe, America, Japan, China, Russia, or were or are now connected to imperial countries as 'allies' like South Korea. Any remaining difference is explained by these imperial powers continuing to project power gained through violence by soft means: dominating culture and international trade. The calculus really is that simple.
The case of Britain vs China isn't a particularly interesting one in this dynamic: it's just the dynamic great powers have always had within their group. The older state has more momentum but is sunsetting. Their wealth still comes from the exact same place, they just haven't quite equalized yet.
Japan did have an empire for a few decades in the early 1900s but there's no way any benefits from that persisted into the post-war period. Anyway their industrialisation was a cause of their imperial success, knocking over their neighbours that had failed to develop, not a result of it.
I see you avoided mention of South Korea or Taiwan. Israel is another example. I'm actually pretty bullish on Iran if they could kick out the clerics, that country has massive potential.
I think it's fair to characterise China as an imperial power, but how much of their current economic power actually comes from controlling say Tibet or Xinjiang? Those are marginal backwaters. They get a bit of forced labour and cheap vegetables. Maybe some minerals, but nothing they couldn't have bought fairly cheaply from Australia.
Do you actually, genuinely think not having their peripheral controlled territories would have prevented China developing? Seriously?
Yes these thefts did happen, our big trading companies were basically organised piracy and extortion. There is an argument that we're still benefiting from investments in infrastructure and social development back then.
That's not why anyone in London today earns more for similar work than people in China or Africa though. You can't apply that argument to say Japan, South Korea or Taiwan for example, or to China today. 20 years ago the Chinese taxi driver would have earned 1/10th of the London taxi driver. Now it's 1/4. Britain burning down the Summer Palace in the 1860s is just not a factor in the reasons for why it used to be 1/10th in 2000 or is now 1/4.