Comment by mncharity
12 hours ago
> 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.
>>far less wealth than might have been created
Like the movie says, if they could have created wealth, they would have created wealth.
"They" = the colonies? They were prevented from creating wealth.
What about before the colonisers got there? Nothing prevented them then.
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