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It's the same for Great Britain. We plundered the wealth of countless countries.
by CrzyLngPwd 3y ago
It's the same for Great Britain. We plundered the wealth of countless countries.
- inglor_cz 3y agoWhile I don't doubt that you (you?) plundered a lot of wealth such as the Koh-i-Noor, you made a lot more money by selling industrial products to willing customers. This is what set you apart from, say, Russia of the 1800s, which was unable to produce any sophisticated stuff for the nascent world market.
- mavelikara 3y agoThe raw materials for many of these industrial products came from plunder.
- inglor_cz 3y agoThis is true until today, on a global scale. Mining and other resource production tends to kill people and create horrible lunar landscapes. I grew up in a rust belt city myself. It is also somewhat nationality-agnostic. Coal miners in Merthyr Tydfil weren't any less exploited than coffee gatherers of Ghana.
- unmole 3y ago> selling industrial products to willing customers Like opium.
- inglor_cz 3y agoThis is an interesting topic. Nowadays, the American concept of "war on drugs" is really ubiquitous, but for a large part of humanity's existence, drug business was considered legitimate. Pure cocaine was freely sold in pharmacies until 1914 or so. I am not that sure if our current moral position is the final one. At the very least, marijuana prohibition has swung from almost universal to a shrinking set of the most conservative US states. Similarly, opium prohibition may not be a thing in 2050 or 2100 again.
- blackoil 3y agoParent is talking about the "Opium Wars" which weren't legitimate drug business.
- blackoil 3y agoAll production requires resources. So plunder is not always in terms of jewels and gold, if you capture a country and force them to buy fabric from your mills or enslave people to work in the plantations or kill all natives and capture the land for the plantation it is a form of plunder.