There's this common trope, but there's two parts to IP; infringement and enforcement.
The British didn't enforce their patents. They could have, but they didn't.
Colonialism ended.
The west was not light years ahead of, say, India, when it was first colonized.
In the process of colonizing it, India's industrialization was stopped.
Countries didn't somehow fall into 'developed' and 'undeveloped' buckets by divine fiat. The latter tended to be invaded by the former, with the occupiers focusing more on wealth extraction, than development.
Once that parasitic relationship has been broken, a large number of developing countries have started moving towards prosperity. Some slower than others, to be sure.
I mean, you can, but your speculation is as good as anyone else's.
In the late 19th century, Russia still had serfs, and Americans practiced chattel slavery. By the mid 20th century, both of those countries built the atomic bomb. A century is a very long time to make accurate alt-historic predictions about.
Colonialism in China ended in 1945, a generation after the Qing dynasty. That time period was not a great time to live there, between the Japanese occupation, the civil war, and the country being split amongst a gaggle of warlords.
Whether or not the country would have developed without all of that is an open question. But if we were to ask whether not all those things were preventing development, the answer is 'Obviously, yes.'
During colonization, GDP, productive output, life expectancy, and quality of life in India plummeted.