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>You must ask yourself what is the reason that people in London have more money As an African that's an easy answer. They stole it. Before you all go clutchin

>You must ask yourself what is the reason that people in London have more money As an African that's an easy answer. They stole it. Before you all go clutching your pearls: it's beyond impractical to even suggest paying it back nor would I even want to think about that. Not an option. not suggesting it. But don't pretend it's because you're special. You stole it. Just own it.

throwaway210222 5y ago
> As an African that's an easy answer. They stole it. As another African, your logic and morality are a disgrace.
- notpachet 5y ago
  Why? I think there's a definite argument to be made that a large part of the West's foundation of economic power is rooted in a history of colonialism and global oppression.
  - throwaway210222 5y ago
    > a large part Yip, they sure stole a lot of stuff - as of course did the Mongols and the Aztecs who are now dirt poor. In addition, the Ventians and Swiss never colonised anyone and are/were dripping cash. But your comment is already a lot more nuanced than the OP's lazy clichéd statements. A hell of a lot of their wealth also came from, amongst other things: - individual rights - e,g, Magna caerta - no theft involved - invention of limited liability corporations - cadastas and private property rights (no theft involved) - common law based on precedent (no theft involved) - investment in mechanised warfare (to keep what they made and stole, see Mongols above) - etc. etc. Once only has to compare Singapore (colonised by British and Japanese) with Ghana since independence in the 1960s. Singapore has no water, no resources, no power, is surrounded by hostile neighbours, but is absolutely loaded. Ghana is resource rich and dirt poor. You can decide for yourself who implemented the list above and who did not. You can also guess who is going to keep digging the hole they are in. But I guess in certain progressive circles, "they stole it" passes for a rigourous analysis. [ And they get the bonus of claiming the moral high ground of being the perpetual victim ]. The OP should read Hernando de Soto instead.
    - 7sidedmarble 5y ago
      It has been noticed that resource rich countries in Africa actually do worse on average than those without. There's a lot of theories as to why: a common one is that it leads to brittle economies with all their eggs in one basket. If your country is rich in emeralds let's say, it doesn't take the entire countries population to mine enough to sell, so what does everyone else do when the whole economy is built around emerald mining? This leads to higher unemployment that's been seen in the mineral rich African states. It also means the economy is very sensitive to the market of the few goods they are rich in. In essence: it is the effect of the entire European world coming in, taking whatever they want, and then absolutely ensuring that independence would be doomed to fail. These economies fail because they're not modern. If Europe wanted Africa to succeed post-colonialisn: it could have helped train people, build infrastructure, etc. Instead they secured rights for foreign companies to continue the work of imperialism even today.
    - randomopining 5y ago
      Your great and nuanced answer is being downvoted. Shows how insane some of these bubbles are. They can't face the facts and want to hide their ego behind simple cliche statements that don't capture even 1% of the reality of history.
- alienthrowaway 5y ago
  As yet another African, the logic is pretty solid to me: the literal Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom have gems plundered from the colonies, most notable is the biggest gem of the entire collection: the diamond known as "The Star of Africa".
  - randomopining 5y ago
    And how do the Crown Jewels give any level of wealth to the common person of the UK? Do the Crown Jewels produce billions of dollars daily that gets handed out to each citizen? Or was it actually the British creating ships, goods, establishing trading posts, furthering science and creating the newest machinery etc... that created their wealth? (And still creates it to this day)
    - throwaway210222 5y ago
      Indeed. And since we are on the topic of the South African 'Star of Africa', the astute investor should note that those muppets in South Africa are busy changing their constitution to allow the expropriation of private property from their own citizens (never mind evil foreigners) a) without compensation, and b) just for kicks - without recourse to the courts. So I ask you: would you be happy if your pension administrator sold up in Switzerland and USA invested your retirement in South African farms and factories? It will impoverish them further, and yet it will be someone else's fault. This is how we in Africa roll.
      - alienthrowaway 5y ago
        Extreme inequality and polarization has consequences. The "rainbow nation" never came to be because wealthy South Africans do not see themselves as having the same destiny as their fellow citizens, and the poor have cottoned on. > It will impoverish them further, and yet it will be someone else's fault. I've noticed certain parallels between segments of South African and American society: people who feel they have been left behind by a wealthy elite that doesn't care about them, and are willing to burn everything to the ground and start anew. Cue a charismatic politician who radically panders to them (despite being part of the elite), the only differences are that South Africa has objectively worse inequality, and has a longer political cycle.
simonh 5y ago
My wife is Chinese and she was taught in the 80s that the reason the UK is richer than China was that 100 earlier before we stole their best stuff. Yes these thefts did happen, our big trading companies were basically organised piracy and extortion. There is an argument that we're still benefiting from investments in infrastructure and social development back then. That's not why anyone in London today earns more for similar work than people in China or Africa though. You can't apply that argument to say Japan, South Korea or Taiwan for example, or to China today. 20 years ago the Chinese taxi driver would have earned 1/10th of the London taxi driver. Now it's 1/4. Britain burning down the Summer Palace in the 1860s is just not a factor in the reasons for why it used to be 1/10th in 2000 or is now 1/4.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Yeah, no. Being essentially a colonial slave does not help at all increase labour productivity, nor valorizing labour. Having no ownership of the capital your labour is used into doesn't help. From that on you can very easily get a 100 year setback economically. Then you have to play catch-up economically. That's where the social dysfunction, literal assasinations, and ethnic regimentation kick in :) Sure it's not 100% about colonialism, but that's the deciding factor.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  It definitely is the reason why. Part of what sets compensation in London is the cost of real estate, and those prices have their origins in the stolen wealth.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    To be fair, quite a lot of the London wealth more recently has been stolen by Russians, or is the rightful property of murderous feudal monarchs in the middle east. We're an equal opportunity laundry.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Property values have risen 30x in the last century in PPP terms. Colonialism might have had an impact on the starting value back then, but the other 97% of the current value was accumulated since then and came from somewhere else. If you think the UK has an advanced economy due to 19th century colonialism you then need to explain the development of countries like Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Japan went from feudal backwater to major global power in 80 years, and it completed that transformation 80 years ago. If you don't believe the UK did anything worthwhile in the last century to earn it's way and is free riding on the profits from stolen Zimbabwean tobacco from 1910, ok fine, now explain Japan.
rosmax_1337 5y ago
There are western countries that are wealthy despite little to no involvement in slave trade. For example Finland. Historical injustices happened between all peoples, and Africans were not a special case, but have been made into a special case because of race relations being very poor primarily in the US. Your bottom line might still be correct however, wealth is a measure of resources and resources are more or less distributed in a zero-sum game. Whenever someone won something, someone else lost something. The importance of the English Empire and their naval dominance isn't something to downplay, and something they indeed should "own", rather than dismiss.
- TremendousJudge 5y ago
  >There are western countries that are wealthy despite little to no involvement in slave trade. You're actually the first to mention the slave trade in the chain -- the discussion was just about wealth. Latin America is still also poor when compared to the "developed countries" at the top of the economic food chain, and their people weren't exported as slaves. But the economic and political structures left by colonialism (both internal and international) meant that the people from these countries could never get out of that hole. Ultimately, people in Finland live much better than in Bolivia because there's a lot more money going around to build nice infrastructure, pay for teachers, quality goods, food, and so on, and where this money comes from can be traced all the way to colonialism. Nokia couldn't have existed in Bolivia, even though the raw materials to make phones can be found there. It lacks absolutely everything else that is required to maintain a company like that: infrastructure, education, political stability. And the reason why this country lacks all of these things, is this "historical injustice". It's not only that the wealth was stolen, but also the capacity to create more wealth was stolen, not just the cobalt, but also the hypothetical industry that could have generated wealth for the people of the country.
  - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
    How do you explain the existence of the Republic of Ireland then? It was definitely colonised, lost all it's forests for the navies of the Empire, and yet is actually pretty rich today (although we still have a lot of post-colonial syndrome, to be fair).
randomopining 5y ago
How did they "steal" it? Like they came and stole your gold 200 years ago and now they're rich forever? lol. How did your African country get all this modern tech that you didn't work towards to invent? How are you using the internet? You must've stolen it. Maybe some countries simply have a good flow of education --> production --> exchange high quality goods for currency.
- nepeckman 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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.
akomtu 5y ago
You mean they stole gold and cadmium? There are three uses of raw minerals: as jewelry, as something to exchange for goods, and as a component of high tech. For most of the Africa, minerals are jewelry at most and to get goods, you need an advanced nation to produce these goods for you. The phone you're using to post these comments has trace amounts of gold and cobalt, probably sourced in Africa, but the rest - the Internet in particular - wasnt created in Africa. And by using goods produced in Europe/America/China, you become complicit in this arrangement.
quotz 5y ago
If Europeans were to argue about theft and slavery between themselves we would have endless wars and constant World War scenarios. Europe, since Ancient Greek time, was at war with itself literally all the time. I believe not a single day has passed in the history of Europe were there wasnt war waged up until modern times. Slavery and war treasures were omnipresent. its just the name of the game.
- rocknor 5y ago
  Bad argument, not even comparable. Colonization of Africa, Asia and Americas was orders of magnitude worse, and more importantly, incredibly recent. Which is why the lingering effects are still there.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Well of course there are lingering effects. Sure. They're just not having macroscopic economic impact today. If Europe was able to develop off the back of exploiting African resources, how come in the several generations since, Africa hasn't been able to develop off the back of African resources? What about all the developed countries that never had any significant empire? There are plenty of them.
    - rocknor 5y ago
      > They're just not having macroscopic economic impact today. Nope. Sorry, you can't whitewash the facts so easily, us from the former colonies won't let you! https://voxeu.org/article/economic-impact-colonialism https://voxeu.org/article/economic-impact-colonialism > If this is right, then a third of income inequality in the world today can be explained by the varying impact of European colonialism on different societies. A big deal. > how come in the several generations since, Africa hasn't been able to develop off the back of African resources Who says it hasn't? I invite you to look at graphs at https://gapminder.org/tools https://gapminder.org/tools. You must avoid the natural binary thinking tendency, there is a whole spectrum between "developing" and "developed". Don't forget that factors like geographical/religious/linguistic etc affect speed of development. Why are black people in the US still not doing well, despite living in the richest country in the world? It is hard to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty. > What about all the developed countries that never had any significant empire Hmm, sneaky attempt at changing goal posts - I never said colonization was necessary for development!

throwaway210222 5y ago

> As an African that's an easy answer. They stole it. As another African, your logic and morality are a disgrace.

notpachet 5y ago
Why? I think there's a definite argument to be made that a large part of the West's foundation of economic power is rooted in a history of colonialism and global oppression.
- throwaway210222 5y ago
  > a large part Yip, they sure stole a lot of stuff - as of course did the Mongols and the Aztecs who are now dirt poor. In addition, the Ventians and Swiss never colonised anyone and are/were dripping cash. But your comment is already a lot more nuanced than the OP's lazy clichéd statements. A hell of a lot of their wealth also came from, amongst other things: - individual rights - e,g, Magna caerta - no theft involved - invention of limited liability corporations - cadastas and private property rights (no theft involved) - common law based on precedent (no theft involved) - investment in mechanised warfare (to keep what they made and stole, see Mongols above) - etc. etc. Once only has to compare Singapore (colonised by British and Japanese) with Ghana since independence in the 1960s. Singapore has no water, no resources, no power, is surrounded by hostile neighbours, but is absolutely loaded. Ghana is resource rich and dirt poor. You can decide for yourself who implemented the list above and who did not. You can also guess who is going to keep digging the hole they are in. But I guess in certain progressive circles, "they stole it" passes for a rigourous analysis. [ And they get the bonus of claiming the moral high ground of being the perpetual victim ]. The OP should read Hernando de Soto instead.
  - 7sidedmarble 5y ago
    It has been noticed that resource rich countries in Africa actually do worse on average than those without. There's a lot of theories as to why: a common one is that it leads to brittle economies with all their eggs in one basket. If your country is rich in emeralds let's say, it doesn't take the entire countries population to mine enough to sell, so what does everyone else do when the whole economy is built around emerald mining? This leads to higher unemployment that's been seen in the mineral rich African states. It also means the economy is very sensitive to the market of the few goods they are rich in. In essence: it is the effect of the entire European world coming in, taking whatever they want, and then absolutely ensuring that independence would be doomed to fail. These economies fail because they're not modern. If Europe wanted Africa to succeed post-colonialisn: it could have helped train people, build infrastructure, etc. Instead they secured rights for foreign companies to continue the work of imperialism even today.
  - randomopining 5y ago
    Your great and nuanced answer is being downvoted. Shows how insane some of these bubbles are. They can't face the facts and want to hide their ego behind simple cliche statements that don't capture even 1% of the reality of history.
alienthrowaway 5y ago
As yet another African, the logic is pretty solid to me: the literal Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom have gems plundered from the colonies, most notable is the biggest gem of the entire collection: the diamond known as "The Star of Africa".
- randomopining 5y ago
  And how do the Crown Jewels give any level of wealth to the common person of the UK? Do the Crown Jewels produce billions of dollars daily that gets handed out to each citizen? Or was it actually the British creating ships, goods, establishing trading posts, furthering science and creating the newest machinery etc... that created their wealth? (And still creates it to this day)
  - throwaway210222 5y ago
    Indeed. And since we are on the topic of the South African 'Star of Africa', the astute investor should note that those muppets in South Africa are busy changing their constitution to allow the expropriation of private property from their own citizens (never mind evil foreigners) a) without compensation, and b) just for kicks - without recourse to the courts. So I ask you: would you be happy if your pension administrator sold up in Switzerland and USA invested your retirement in South African farms and factories? It will impoverish them further, and yet it will be someone else's fault. This is how we in Africa roll.
    - alienthrowaway 5y ago
      Extreme inequality and polarization has consequences. The "rainbow nation" never came to be because wealthy South Africans do not see themselves as having the same destiny as their fellow citizens, and the poor have cottoned on. > It will impoverish them further, and yet it will be someone else's fault. I've noticed certain parallels between segments of South African and American society: people who feel they have been left behind by a wealthy elite that doesn't care about them, and are willing to burn everything to the ground and start anew. Cue a charismatic politician who radically panders to them (despite being part of the elite), the only differences are that South Africa has objectively worse inequality, and has a longer political cycle.

simonh 5y ago

My wife is Chinese and she was taught in the 80s that the reason the UK is richer than China was that 100 earlier before we stole their best stuff. Yes these thefts did happen, our big trading companies were basically organised piracy and extortion. There is an argument that we're still benefiting from investments in infrastructure and social development back then. That's not why anyone in London today earns more for similar work than people in China or Africa though. You can't apply that argument to say Japan, South Korea or Taiwan for example, or to China today. 20 years ago the Chinese taxi driver would have earned 1/10th of the London taxi driver. Now it's 1/4. Britain burning down the Summer Palace in the 1860s is just not a factor in the reasons for why it used to be 1/10th in 2000 or is now 1/4.

sudosysgen 5y ago
Yeah, no. Being essentially a colonial slave does not help at all increase labour productivity, nor valorizing labour. Having no ownership of the capital your labour is used into doesn't help. From that on you can very easily get a 100 year setback economically. Then you have to play catch-up economically. That's where the social dysfunction, literal assasinations, and ethnic regimentation kick in :) Sure it's not 100% about colonialism, but that's the deciding factor.
selfhoster11 5y ago
It definitely is the reason why. Part of what sets compensation in London is the cost of real estate, and those prices have their origins in the stolen wealth.
- pjc50 5y ago
  To be fair, quite a lot of the London wealth more recently has been stolen by Russians, or is the rightful property of murderous feudal monarchs in the middle east. We're an equal opportunity laundry.
- simonh 5y ago
  Property values have risen 30x in the last century in PPP terms. Colonialism might have had an impact on the starting value back then, but the other 97% of the current value was accumulated since then and came from somewhere else. If you think the UK has an advanced economy due to 19th century colonialism you then need to explain the development of countries like Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Japan went from feudal backwater to major global power in 80 years, and it completed that transformation 80 years ago. If you don't believe the UK did anything worthwhile in the last century to earn it's way and is free riding on the profits from stolen Zimbabwean tobacco from 1910, ok fine, now explain Japan.

rosmax_1337 5y ago

There are western countries that are wealthy despite little to no involvement in slave trade. For example Finland. Historical injustices happened between all peoples, and Africans were not a special case, but have been made into a special case because of race relations being very poor primarily in the US. Your bottom line might still be correct however, wealth is a measure of resources and resources are more or less distributed in a zero-sum game. Whenever someone won something, someone else lost something. The importance of the English Empire and their naval dominance isn't something to downplay, and something they indeed should "own", rather than dismiss.

TremendousJudge 5y ago
>There are western countries that are wealthy despite little to no involvement in slave trade. You're actually the first to mention the slave trade in the chain -- the discussion was just about wealth. Latin America is still also poor when compared to the "developed countries" at the top of the economic food chain, and their people weren't exported as slaves. But the economic and political structures left by colonialism (both internal and international) meant that the people from these countries could never get out of that hole. Ultimately, people in Finland live much better than in Bolivia because there's a lot more money going around to build nice infrastructure, pay for teachers, quality goods, food, and so on, and where this money comes from can be traced all the way to colonialism. Nokia couldn't have existed in Bolivia, even though the raw materials to make phones can be found there. It lacks absolutely everything else that is required to maintain a company like that: infrastructure, education, political stability. And the reason why this country lacks all of these things, is this "historical injustice". It's not only that the wealth was stolen, but also the capacity to create more wealth was stolen, not just the cobalt, but also the hypothetical industry that could have generated wealth for the people of the country.
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  How do you explain the existence of the Republic of Ireland then? It was definitely colonised, lost all it's forests for the navies of the Empire, and yet is actually pretty rich today (although we still have a lot of post-colonial syndrome, to be fair).

randomopining 5y ago

How did they "steal" it? Like they came and stole your gold 200 years ago and now they're rich forever? lol. How did your African country get all this modern tech that you didn't work towards to invent? How are you using the internet? You must've stolen it. Maybe some countries simply have a good flow of education --> production --> exchange high quality goods for currency.

nepeckman 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  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.

akomtu 5y ago

You mean they stole gold and cadmium? There are three uses of raw minerals: as jewelry, as something to exchange for goods, and as a component of high tech. For most of the Africa, minerals are jewelry at most and to get goods, you need an advanced nation to produce these goods for you. The phone you're using to post these comments has trace amounts of gold and cobalt, probably sourced in Africa, but the rest - the Internet in particular - wasnt created in Africa. And by using goods produced in Europe/America/China, you become complicit in this arrangement.

quotz 5y ago

If Europeans were to argue about theft and slavery between themselves we would have endless wars and constant World War scenarios. Europe, since Ancient Greek time, was at war with itself literally all the time. I believe not a single day has passed in the history of Europe were there wasnt war waged up until modern times. Slavery and war treasures were omnipresent. its just the name of the game.

rocknor 5y ago
Bad argument, not even comparable. Colonization of Africa, Asia and Americas was orders of magnitude worse, and more importantly, incredibly recent. Which is why the lingering effects are still there.
- simonh 5y ago
  Well of course there are lingering effects. Sure. They're just not having macroscopic economic impact today. If Europe was able to develop off the back of exploiting African resources, how come in the several generations since, Africa hasn't been able to develop off the back of African resources? What about all the developed countries that never had any significant empire? There are plenty of them.
  - rocknor 5y ago
    > They're just not having macroscopic economic impact today. Nope. Sorry, you can't whitewash the facts so easily, us from the former colonies won't let you! https://voxeu.org/article/economic-impact-colonialism https://voxeu.org/article/economic-impact-colonialism > If this is right, then a third of income inequality in the world today can be explained by the varying impact of European colonialism on different societies. A big deal. > how come in the several generations since, Africa hasn't been able to develop off the back of African resources Who says it hasn't? I invite you to look at graphs at https://gapminder.org/tools https://gapminder.org/tools. You must avoid the natural binary thinking tendency, there is a whole spectrum between "developing" and "developed". Don't forget that factors like geographical/religious/linguistic etc affect speed of development. Why are black people in the US still not doing well, despite living in the richest country in the world? It is hard to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty. > What about all the developed countries that never had any significant empire Hmm, sneaky attempt at changing goal posts - I never said colonization was necessary for development!