This is a persistent mythology of western economic history to "cleanwash" the past and "explain" the present inequality (or what was the present until recently)
Think about the components of all those innovations from the past and if they would have been possible (to scale) without violent and forcible extraction of resources from around the globe, incl forced labor.
Think about when GDP was constructed and how, and from which point stuff got counted into it (ie from which point in the production chain it added to a country´s gdp). If you take raw materials X and Y from somewhere, by force and for cheap, then make sth like a out of it and only count that topline, now you have a big gdp, congrats.
Eg even the "US" was not even "settled" (forcible land expansion) until the late 19th or early 20th century. So you have a steady influx of cheap/free land to support a growing population that keeps adding to the "gdp". Lo and behold, soon after this dynamic stopped, financial bubble and bust ensues.
The main lesson for me is that progress and growth are completely separate things/concepts. You can absolutely progress without "growing" (bloating) your gdp, if you change some things. You can absolutely regress while "growing" (bloating) your gdp. Look at "US" today.
Chicken are coming home to roost. This is why first instinct of Trump and his cohorts is now to expand again "US" borders. Go back to extraction to "grow", since they are institutionally and mentally incapable of progress without extraction. More importantly, without "growth" the system as it is will collapse. It behaves like a cancer that has close to killed its host. It´s over, and anyone who can see knows it on some level.
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.
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.
May be progress is as simple as making energy very cheap, ensuring a diverse manufacturing capability with most efficient methods while making sure 1 or 2 inputs do not bottleneck you.
Larger and bigger powers can control different parts of 'supply chain' (for lack of a better word) and make it difficult to progress without them getting a royalty. In their minds they are justified as they made progress first and others are simply copying their IP
This is in line with Pommeranz (a western economic historian) and most of the whole "Great divergence" litterature.
> Think about the components of all those innovations from the past and if they would have been possible (to scale) without violent and forcible extraction of resources from around the globe, incl forced labor.
This is just silly. Everywhere had forced labour, but didn't manage to build what the west did. The African slavers selling their fellow continent-dwellers didn't somehow manage to pick all the people who could build the most advanced things in the world at the time.
Oxford University was founded in 1096, long before what you're describing. This is very strong evidence that the UK has a thousand years of excellent investment in education, which much better explains all the advantages that built its empire, the good bits and bad. Its advances are in part due to the Roman colonisation, which allowed Britain to rediscover things that much more advanced civilisation had discovered 1000 years prior to that founding, and then push on to far greater heights.
There are entire countries that still wouldn't have universities today if left to their own devices. But they would still have slaves, because western powers wouldn't have ended this practice, either through Christianity or, if that didn't work, by force.
What racist and xenophobic BS.
Other civilizations had great academic and scientific revolutions, much before Oxfordians did anything of note. Just look at the history of Indian, Chinese, Persian, and Arabic mathematics for a simple example, or Indian linguistic inquiry for another.
The romans did not discover anything the celts had built in the british isles; they largely existed in opposition to them.
> Other civilizations had great academic and scientific revolutions
I didn't say they didn't. The ancient Egyptians built the Pyramids, too. But that doesn't mean Egypt sustained that advantage and developed leading-edge science, values, and technology to the present day. They had a brief moment, and they are today in some ways a very cool country, but, as with most countries, they measure progress as "how far along the tech and culture trees we are compared to the West".
> The romans did not discover anything the celts had built in the british isles; they largely existed in opposition to them.
Maybe you should read my comment again tomorrow, with a clearer head.
> What racist and xenophobic BS.
A much clearer head.