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The 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.
by fujincodes 2y ago
The 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.