most of europe had very little income from international trade until 1800 or sth
Comment on Anon's class fails expectations
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 20 hours agoYou make it sound like spoils of war wasn’t the main income for Europe for pretty much all of history until then. Colonialism put a little nicer name on it.
gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org 11 hours ago
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 24 minutes ago
Spoils and plunder isn’t really trade. Rome wasn’t trading for slaves, Spain wasn’t trading for gold, England wasn’t trading for anything that they could lift…
flying_sheep@lemmy.ml 19 hours ago
You’re right in what you say but it’s not relevant to this discussion. Colonialism is a very different MO than attacking neighboring countries.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 12 hours ago
Eh, Nazi Germany basically attacked Poland to do settler colonialism (or at least that was the regime’s justification). Main difference is that the Poles were more developed that e.g. the Native Americans.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
It’s a matter of distance really. Germany raiding France or Brazil isn’t functionally different.
jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
brazil didn’t yet have weapons to attack the homeland, france did
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 20 hours ago
After industrialization, selling industrial products was frequently far more profitable than the expensive and uncertain spoils of war. And there wasn’t really a likely reality where Nazi Germany fought their war in a way that was actually winnable.
musubibreakfast@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
You’re right about colonialism being a net loss for the government. In the Netherlands the NSB (Dutch Nazi Party) based a lot of their messaging around the idea that if the Netherlands were to join up with the allied forces, they would be forced to relinquish their colonies.
This was absolute nonsense but it spoke to people at the time because the idea of giving the colonies their independence had become a popular talking point during the recession because they were no longer profitable (fuckery involving the united fruit company).
During the second world war the Dutch colonies would become profitable but for completely different reasons. Basically a lot of the fosfate used in bombs came from Curacao and the aluminum to craft airplanes came from Suriname.
gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org 11 hours ago
noteworthy the british empire never turned a profit for england at all. it was losses all the way through. the english wikipedia article mentions it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 9 hours ago
Also, duckduckgoing it, there are quite a few sources that still claim that the British Empire wasn’t profitable for the government in Britain, or regular British people, e.g.:
www.jstor.org/stable/2598015
iea.org.uk/…/empire-and-slavery-did-not-make-brit…
(I’m not that knowledgable about the quality of these particular sources, just demonstrating that the claim isn’t rare)
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 10 hours ago
TBH the “Economy of the British Empire” article is poorly sourced, especially for the claim that Britain profited from its colonies - the linked source is a Fortune article (even if it has help from an economic historian from Stanford), with only one paragraph on the British empire, and the relevant sentance seems to be this:
“At the height of the British Empire, about 6% of its total output came from its colonies, more than any other Western power.”
I don’t really understand what this is supposed to mean, since according to the table in the Wikipedia article, British India’s GDP was higher than the UK’s. 6% certainly doesn’t sound impressive. But even then, GDP =/= profit, and being the worldwide dominant power is not really a status that most colonial powers can hope to achieve.