Welcome to Keith and I don't tread on anyone in the
Libertarian Institute. Here is a section from Thomas
Sol's book Basic Economics titled Imperialism.
Conquests have transferred wealth as well as cultures among
nations and peoples. During the height of the Spanish
Empire, more than 200 tons of gold were shipped from the
Western Hemisphere to Spain, and more than 18,000 tons of silver.
King Leopold of Belgium likewise took vast riches from the
Belgian Congo. In both cases and others,
imperial powers extracted huge amounts of wealth from some
conquered peoples, often through forced labour.
Of those peoples, as John Stuart Mill put it, conquerors have
often treated the conquered peoples as mere dirt under their
feet. This was true not only of
European conquests in the Western Hemisphere, Africa and
Asia. It was equally true of
indigenous conquerors, of other indigenous peoples in all those
places, and of Asian, Middle Eastern and North African
conquerors who invaded Europe in the centuries preceding
Europeans invasions of other lands.
From a purely economic standpoint, putting aside the
painful implications of such behaviour for human nature in
general, the question is how much did these conquests and
enslavements of the past explain economic disparities among
nations and peoples in the present?
There was no question that during the centuries when Spain
was the leading conqueror in the world, it destroyed whole
civilizations such as those of the Incas and the Mayans, and
impoverished whole peoples in the process of enriching itself.
Spain's empire in the Western Hemisphere extended continuously
from the southern tip of South America all the way to the San
Francisco Bay, and also included Florida, among other places,
while there were also parts of Europe ruled by Spain and, in
Asia, the Philippines. But there was also no question
that Spain is today one of the poorer countries in Western
Europe. Meanwhile, European countries
that have never had empires such as Switzerland and Norway have
higher standards of living than Spain.
While the vast wealth that poured into Spain from its
colonies could have been invested in building up the
Commerce and Industry of the country and building up the
literacy and occupational skills of its people, this wealth was
in fact largely dissipated in the consumption of imported
luxuries and military adventures during the Golden Age of Spain
in the 16th century. Both luxuries and war were
primarily for the benefit of a ruling elite rather than for the
advancement of the Spanish people at large.
So in other words, saying that Spain benefited from imperialism
is like saying America benefits from invading Iraq, Afghanistan,
Yemen, Libya, and Pakistan because Boeing, Raytheon, and
Northrop Grumman gained a lot of wealth.
It's not that the entire society benefits as a whole.
Some parasites within that society benefit at the expense
of others. As late as 1900, more than half
the population of Spain remained illiterate.
By contrast, in the United States that same year, a
majority of the black population could read and write despite
having been free Less than 50 years a century later, the real
per capita income in Spain was slightly lower than the real per
capita income of black Americans.
Like many conquering peoples, the Spaniards in their golden
age disdained commerce, industry and labor, and their elites
revelled in leisurely and luxurious living.
This led to a large and continuous drain of precious
metals from Spain to other countries to pay for imports.
Silver could thus become in short supply within Spain just
weeks after the arrival of ships laden with silver from its
Western Hemisphere colonies. The Spaniards themselves spoke
of gold as pouring down on Spain like rain on a roof flowing on a
way. Immediately.
Nor were Spaniards unique among great conquering peoples and
having little to show economically in later centuries
for their earlier historic conquests and exploitations of
other peoples. The descendants of Genghis
Khans, vast conquering hordes in Central Asia, are today among
the poorer peoples of the world. So are the many peoples in the
Middle East who were once part of the triumphant Ottoman Empire
that ruled conquered lands in Europe, North Africa, and the
Middle East. Nor have the descendants of the
peoples of the Mongol Empire or the Russian Empire been
particularly prosperous. Britain might seem to be the
exception in that it once had the largest empire of
all-encompassing 1/4 of the land area of the earth and 1/4 of the
human race, and today has a high standard of living.
However, it is questionable whether the British Empire had a
net profit over the relatively brief span of history in which
it was at its ascendancy. Individual Britons such as Cecil
Rhodes grew rich in the empire, but the British taxpayers bore
the heavy cost of conquering and maintaining the empire,
including the world's largest burden of military expenditures
per capita. Britain also had at one time the
world's largest slave trade in its empire.
But even if all the profits from slavery had been invested in
British industry, this would have amounted to less than 2% of
Britain's domestic investments during that era.
The economic record of slavery in general as a source of
lasting economic development, is unimpressive.
Slavery was concentrated in the southern part of the United
States and in the northern part of Brazil, and in both cases
these remained less prosperous and less technologically
advanced regions of these countries.
Similarly in Europe, where slavery persisted in Eastern
Europe long after it had died out in Western Europe, the
latter being for centuries the faster growing and more
prosperous part of the continent right up into the present day.
Slavery continued in the Middle East and in parts of sub-Saharan
Africa long after it was banished from the rest of the
world. But the Middle East and
sub-Saharan Africa are today places noted for more poverty
than for economic achievements. In short, forcible transfers of
wealth from some nations or peoples to other nations or
peoples, whether through conquest or enslavement, can be
large without producing lasting economic development.
A vast amount of human suffering may produce little more than the
transient enrichment of contemporary elites who live in
luxury and invest little or nothing for the benefit of
future generations. What was said of serfdom in
Russia is that it Simply put, much wealth in the hands of a
spendthrift nobility would apply to other systems of oppression
elsewhere that contributed little or nothing to economic
development. By and large, imperialism cannot
be said unequivocally to have been a net economic benefit or a
net economic loss to those who were conquered.
In some cases it was clearly one rather than the other.
But even where there were long run benefits to the descendants
of conquered peoples, as in Western European nations
conquered by Romans, the generations that were conquered
and lived under Roman oppression were by no means necessarily
better off. However, even such a British
patriot as Winston Churchill said we owe London to Rome
because the ancient Britons created nothing comparable
themselves. Yet the sufferings and
humiliations inflicted on ancient Britons provoked a mass
uprising that was put down by the Romans with a merciless
slaughter of thousands. What can be said from an
economic standpoint is that there was little compelling
evidence that current economic disparities between nations in
income and wealth can be explained by a history of
imperial exploitation. There were usually large
economic or other disparities before these conquests, and
these pre-existing disparities facilitated worldwide conquests
by relatively modest sized nations like Spain and Britain,
each of which conquered vastly larger lands and populations
than their own. Thank you for watching Keith and
I don't tread on anyone in the Libertarian Institute.