Comment by mncharity

> basically lost it all

Last week I worked up this one-liner: "Great Britain extracted the wealth of a vast empire, far less wealth than might have been created, pissed most of it away through bad domestic policy, and transferred the rest to the USA to pay for one-and-a-half world wars."

A failure to reinvest in domestic industrial tech; a painfully high-value currency; and low-mobility economic stratification. History does love its rhyming slams.