The European powers used Africa and India and south America as the resources and funding for all the advancements of the industrial revolution
Progressive cope bullshit. Almost all colonial enterprises were a net loss for the colonial powers in terms of resources.
Colonialism was never about resources, you could hardly fit a damn thing worth half a shit on those boats. They had low capacity, sailed slow as shit, and the materials couldn't be condensed like they can now.
Colonialism was mainly about strategic naval bases for wars against other colonial powers. The majority of resources extracted were luxury things like spices and diamonds and shit. Cotton was the most useful colonial enterprise due to it's use in gunpowder but almost all of that was made in the USA which actually DID become a functional country (i wonder why?) The idea that the prosperity of the west is built on things they stole from the global shitholes of the world is one of the biggest lies ever told.
It also has been lost to history but
the white man's burden was a big thing.
Empathy, our greatest strength and our greatest weakness, told us we had to civilize these people at any costs. For their own good, because we saw things like this
https://youtu.be/JI4uirwxx1Y?t=388
With the exception of possibly some parts of Asia, every single place that was touched by colonialism benefited drastically in the long run and short term, far more than Europe did from the "stolen" resources. That includes native Americans who are almost extinct. If you took any native American back in time and let them live like that for a day they would never choose to go back willingly.
without sharing any of the expertise with the locals, they may have left refinery's but not one university.
Unimaginable cope. The fucking machines were left sitting there. The textbooks were sitting there. They were desperately trying to teach them language other than maybe under Leopold's congo.
Other civilizations managed to do this from the ground up starting with sticks and stones, why can none of these places manage to do it with a 2000 year head start? Can nobody reverse engineer the damn things?
Can you imagine if the ancient Greeks or Romans stumbled upon a fucking rifle? A steam engine? A printing press? Even a fucking fountain pen? They wouldn't have been able to make it immediately but with a proof of concept like that they wouldn't give up until they found a way.
The entire world owes Europe a massive debt and I say this as a pure blooded American who was Scottish before that (one of the few white nations that never colonized a damn thing unless the English forced us to) so i really take no genetic pride in being able to do it. England, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy, produced the human beings who created everything good about the modern world and to deny that is to live in fantasy land.
Deep down every seething internet brownoid, every woke leftist, every college professor, knows this. But they will do everything they can to keep the cope going.
