"Why Western Europe Became Rich in the Past"
Colonies
No, many of the colonies were a drain on Europe, if not at first certainly later on. Spain's colonies on paper made Spain richer (and for a time not just on paper), but much of the extra gold just resulted in inflation down the line. The British colonies that became the US, required more in money for battles against French, American Indians, and American revolutionaries then the real wealth the UK got from them. Germany (the richest large economy in Europe), and Italy, got in to colonization late, and didn't keep their colonies for nearly as long, and probably lost money from the effort.
I'm not saying that colonies never contributed to European wealth, sometimes they did (esp. when the colonizing effort was a relatively quick strip of assets with little violent resistance by locals, by separatist/revolutionary colonists, or by other European powers). But even the best cases for that argument amount to small contributions to Europe's growing wealth.
Mainly Europe became wealthy from wealth produced withing Europe, when it was taxed and regulated less than it is now. |
