[nepeckman]

> How did they "steal" it? Like they came and stole your gold 200 years ago and now they're rich forever? lol.

Unironically, yes this is how capitalism works. If you have resources, you leverage those resources to produce goods and services that increase your total wealth. If I were to walk into a bank and steal a couple million dollars, maybe I could leverage that money into a successful business. Maybe so successful that it produces inner-generational wealth, so that my great-great-grandchildren are on average more wealthy than they would have been otherwise. I may have "earned" this money with my hypothetical business skills, but it doesn't change the fact that I only had the opportunity because I stole the money.

So yeah, many enterprising individuals took land and resources (and plenty of slave labor) from the Americas/Africa/Asia for hundreds of years, and were able to leverage those resources into even more wealth, thus people in London have more money, thus taxi drivers make more money.

[simonh]

The problem with this is that WW2 wiped us out financially, and then post-war nationalisation wiped us out economically. ww1 had done a pretty good job on us as well, as did the depression between the wars.

The value of the UK economy, since around 1930, has increased in PPP terms by about 90%. So there's a reasonable argument the value in 1930 was partly down to imperialism, although I think industrialisation was a much bigger factor. Still, the 90% of our economic value we accrued since then certainly didn't come from colonialism, so where did it come from?

Look at Japan, yes it had an empire for a few decades before WW2, but that was mainly a result of industrialisation that had already happened, not a cause of it. Look at what's happened in China since it opened up and liberalised it's economy. At least they finally, finally figured this out.