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The word colony appears just once. Britain's economy was built on extracting resources from her colonies around the world. Surely what was happening in India, A
by vishnugupta 2y ago
The word colony appears just once. Britain's economy was built on extracting resources from her colonies around the world. Surely what was happening in India, African continent, and elsewhere had some bearing on rise/fall of their economy? Perhaps they got spread too thin trying to administer so many colonies with so few people? Perhaps colonies started exerting more and more resistance?
- fujincodes 2y agoThe UK has always been a poor country except for a few hundred years when they were propped up by enslaving other people and looting them.
- nbevans 2y ago[flagged]
- fujincodes 2y agoThat is entirely orthogonal to the matter at hand. But go ahead, expose your bias and take a guess.
- nbevans 2y ago[flagged]
- fujincodes 2y agoI have no bias against the UK if that's what you're implying. In fact, I very much like English literature etc. I am just stating the fact that they have historically been a very poor society with a large divide between the haves and have-nots.
- radicalbyte 2y agoThat holds for every society historically as the period we are living in is, relative to the history of civilisation, one of incredible wealth and abundance. The question is - is our current level only an historical blip?
- apwell23 2y agopost isnt about "every country" .
- blackoil 2y agoAnd that is why I don't find China's policy to "steal" IP as offensive as to some western people and hope my country to emulate some. That's how the rich got rich and hoping honesty and hard work will bring you up is naive.
- Veen 2y agoWell, that and the Industrial Revolution.
- Earw0rm 2y agoWe've seen how the enslaving and exploiting thing worked out. We're just hitting the Find Out stage of the running a world economy on fossil fuels thing. Oh well. 200 years ain't a bad run.
- lordofgibbons 2y agoDidn't the industrial revolution take off in Britain in order to more cheaply/efficiently process the raw material "brought in" from India for making fabrics?
- philwelch 2y agoNo. Britain has always had domestic wool, and they imported a lot of their cotton from America before the Civil War put an end to that.
- defrost 2y agoThe US Civil War put a damper on the trade volume for a period of time, it came back stronger afterwards. So successful was the transition of slave labor into sharecropping and tenant farming during and after the war that cotton production actually expanded dramatically. By 1870, American cotton farmers surpassed their previous harvest high, set in 1860. By 1877, they regained and surpassed their pre-war market share in Great Britain. By 1880 they exported more cotton than they had in 1860. ~ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/civil-war-cotton-capitalism-114776 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/civil-war-co... During the US Civil War cotton volumes went down and mills, mill workers in Lancashire and Cheshire experienced widespread poverty ... However for a well placed elite few, cotton profits from trade climbed dramatically .. Despite cotton shortages in England, merchants would sometimes re-export the materials that did arrive to other ports in Europe. Notably, they also re-exported materials from the South to the North, because the Union also struggled from being cut off from direct trade with the Confederacy. As a result, during the war, cotton grown in the Confederacy could be shipped out of a southern port to Britain to evade the Union blockade, sold in Liverpool, and then shipped back across the Atlantic to a northern port, evading the Confederate cruisers. Liverpool's docks also benefitted as profitable wartime enterprises emerged, particularly the increased trade of commodities such as ships and armaments. The Union's merchant marine, nearly the world's largest in 1860, was devastated throughout the war in part by the Confederate warships supplied through Liverpool. In addition, as a result of the war, cotton speculation and brokerage, rather than trade in cotton itself, became immensely profitable for a number of merchants. ~ https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/liverpools-abercromby-square/britain-and-us-civil-war/impact-cotton-trade https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/liverpools-aberc...
- Earw0rm 2y agoThat doesn't really make sense historically. "The UK" is a modern concept relatively speaking, the Act of Union didn't pass until long after the slaving and looting got going.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> That doesn't really make sense historically. "The UK" is a modern concept relatively speaking It makes perfect sense; you just have to acknowledge that to anyone outside England, "England" and "the UK" are identical in meaning.
- daedalus_f 2y agoIt’s surprising how many people get them mixed up even in the UK. England is one country of the United Kingdom. Scotland, England and Wales make up the island of Great Britain, the largest of the British Isles. The UK also includes Northern Ireland. Hence: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island. I was confused too, thought that Great Britain referred to the archipelago as a whole (excluding Ireland) rather than the largest island.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoI've seen it stated variously that Little Britain is either Ireland, or Brittany. For a long time I've felt that one of the traditional titles of the Russian czars, "Czar of all the Russias", was cooler than the titles I was aware of for other rulers. I was surprised to find the seal of an English queen on Wikipedia which clearly showed a Latin title translating as "Queen of all the Britains". The switch from "King of Britain" to "King of the Britains" seems to have occurred during the reign of George III, judging by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Seal_of_the_Realm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Seal_of_the_Realm . None of those include an "all", but I'm sure it was present in the seal I saw.
- amenhotep 2y ago"Britanniarum omnium"? Present from what I can tell on coins rather than the Great Seal. Also medals and maybe some other things.
- sph 2y agoYes, the British empire has been very poor except when it was rich.
- wqaatwt 2y agoCan you name a single non-tiny country that became rich prior to the 1900s using any other means?
- inglor_cz 2y agoEngland in the Early Middle Ages was rich enough to attract Vikings both to plunder and settle, and Normans to conquer it. In the High Middle Ages, it was capable of maintaining pretty expensive wars on the continent without going bankrupt. The UK as a whole exists only since 1707, and by that time, it was already a major power. Did it have a numerous poor population? Yes, much like the US now does. But that is not the same as being a poor country in the sense that Somalia or Timor Leste are.
- daedalus_f 2y agoThe British empire reached its territorial peak in about 1921. This article is more about its domestic economic decline during the late 19th century.
- tedeh 2y agoNot mentioned more because it probably just wasn't that important.
- mytailorisrich 2y agoThe insistence on explaining every successes of the UK/Europe with its colonies is politically orientated, not factual. It seems to be a common trope in India, I'd say intended for domestic political consumption. The industrial revolution and the birth of the modern economy were not caused by the colonies. Likewise, the decline of the UK's economy was not caused by the loss of colonies. Hence a single mention in the article, which discusses many reasons and potential reasons of the decline relative to the US and Germany (Germany never had a significant colonial empire and what it had was lost at the end of WWI).
- surgical_fire 2y ago> The industrial revolution and the birth of the modern economy were not caused by the colonies. Perhaps not directly, but the influx of gold and silver from Spanish and Portuguese colonies to Europe would later pump up the economy of other countries - such as England and Netherlands - that would eventually lead to things such as the industrial revolution. I'd say that rejecting that much of Europe's success during that time was a direct consequence of extracting a large amount of resources from oversea colonies is a common trope in Europe, perhaps for internal political consumption.
- mytailorisrich 2y agoA mountain of gold does not create the industrial revolution. I am not going to discuss further since, obviously, this is not a discussion but low value political argument... Edit: I would argue that European colonialism and the industrial revolution are both consequences of deep changes and innovations across all domains that started during the Renaissance (which means 'rebirth' in French) and that propelled Europe far ahead everyone else, hence global subjugation on the one hand, and the scientific and industrial revolution on the other.
- surgical_fire 2y agoYou are not going to discuss further because you lack arguments. Portugal and Spain, the first order beneficiaries of the mountains of gold and silver (among other resources) they extracted from America in 17th and 18th century were too busy playing colonialism to do anything else. Other nations in the region that did trade with them reaped the opportunity of having very wealthy neighbors that were happy to just spend their newfound wealth. Your argument was essentially "nahh, extracting a ridiculous amount of resources from massive overseas colonies had nothing to do with Europe's success".
- inglor_cz 2y agoSpain had a very extensive colonial empire. So did, in fact, Turkey. They didn't manage to build anything modern over it. Putin's Russia rules over 17 million sqkm which were once conquered by the tsars, and it is an economic backwater.
- bell-cot 2y ago> ...once conquered by the tsars, and it is an economic backwater. By some metrics, perhaps. But consider (per Wikipedia) - > The mineral-packed Ural Mountains and the vast fossil fuel (oil, gas, coal), and timber reserves of Siberia and the Russian Far East make Russia rich in natural resources, which dominate Russian exports. Oil and gas exports, specifically, continue to be the main source of hard currency. > Russia has been widely described as an energy superpower;[33] as it has the world's largest natural gas reserves,[34] the second-largest coal reserves,[35] the eighth-largest oil reserves,[36] and the largest oil shale reserves in Europe.[37] It is the world's leading natural gas exporter,[38] the second-largest natural gas producer,[39] the second-largest oil exporter[40] and producer,[41] and the third largest coal exporter.
- inglor_cz 2y agoGiven that they control about 10 per cent of the entire land mass, it would be strange if they didn't have a lot of natural resources. But having a lot of natural resources is often described as an economic curse: it motivates the country to embrace extractive practices and build extractive institutions, where human lives don't matter and innovation is superfluous. The main avenue to riches and power is control of a mine... by any, often brutal, means. Looking at Russia, it very much didn't escape that curse. A shocking proportion of highly educated Russian professionals lives abroad. I would bet that when it comes to sophisticated products with high added value, the Russian diaspora produces more of them than the Russians who are still present in Russia. Perhaps even the Russian diaspora in the Silicon Valley alone does so.