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.