Comment by BurningFrog
4 months ago
The west didn't get rich from colonizing the world.
It got rich domestically through industrialism. Then the newly rich countries went on to colonize the world, because now they could. If and how much the colonies made them even richer is debatable, but it was probably a net cost on average.
This is one of several insights counter to "common sense" that economists have figured out.
> If and how much the colonies made them even richer is debatable, but it was probably a net cost on average. This is one of several insights counter to "common sense" that economists have figured out.
I haven't heard this before, do you have sources where I could learn more?
Acemoglu (last year's prize) has some.
Circumstancial evidence includes:
1. Having natural resources is often bad for development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
2. Scotland is in the UK because it tried to do colonialism, bankrupted itself and had to sell itself to England.
2. Ireland and Finland are doing as well as any other European country but never colonized anyone and were themselves colonized.
Colonialism is basically just a distracting game countries played before economic growth was invented.
Acemoglu has argued that colonialism helped develop European economies:
"Our hypothesis is that Atlantic trade—the opening of the sea routes to the New World, Africa, and Asia and the building of colonial empires—contributed to the process of West European growth between 1500 and 1850, not only through direct economic effects, but also indirectly by inducing fundamental institutional change."
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jrobinson/files/jr_AERAtla...
Where has he argued the opposite?
That the West got wealthy from the Industrial Revolution is a commonly accepted fact AFAIK.
We didn't steal that wealth from Africa, in part because Africa had very little wealth.
I don't have a great link laying out this in more detail, but I know Johan Norberg has written and talked a fair amount about this.
Aren't natural resources wealth? Isn't forced work wealth? "Stealing" seems like the best word to describe the situation without obfuscating the matter with grander narratives (the kind that might win you the "Nobel prize" for economy, incidentally).
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of course he doesn't because he just made it up.
he's probably grasping to "research" from before the 30s, if even that, expect to ignore elites and focus on average country gdp nonsense.
On the one hand my common sense wants to say of course, the more you transform a natural resource into something complex and desirable, the more value you create so yes all this wealth is the product of industrialism but on the other hand... all those natural resources had to come from somewhere no ? It would seem to me that colonialism was an essential part in this wealth creation even if the whole enterprise of getting your hands on those resources were in themselves a net cost
Natural resources are much less important for prosperity than people think.
I won't write an essay about it, but note that (1) Russia and Africa both have enormous natural resources and are very poor, and (2) Hong Kong and Singapore have no natural resources and are very rich.
There are scientists that reach quite different conclusions from you.
https://www.jasonhickel.org/research
Let me just add that the colonizing of the Americas in the 1500s was of course unrelated to industrialism emerging centuries later. Much of that was an accident of immunology.
Note that industrialized countries without colonial empires ended up at least as rich as the big European colonial powers.