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Comment by walthamstow | Hacker News Reader

The past UK standard of living was based on pillaging the colonies, then after divestment of Empire it was briefly propped up in the 80s by North Sea oil and in the 00s by financial deregulation.

No shit we're not going to have the same standard of living as the past.

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Colonies were always irrelevant to metropolitan standards of living. See how Norway, Sweden and Denmark with tiny or non-existent empires did as well as Britain, or how Germany and Austria-Hungary were no less wealthy than France. Developing makes a country rich. Looting a non-developed country is a one time thing. Developing is ongoing.

> See how Norway, Sweden and Denmark with tiny or non-existent empires did as well as Britain, or how Germany and Austria-Hungary were no less wealthy than France.

Sweden had an empire, Austria-Hungary was an empire up till the end of WWI. Also, there was extreme poverty in Norway and Sweden not that long ago (the 19th century), leading many to emigrate to the US. The same with German emigration.

> Austria-Hungary was an empire up till the end of WWI

It was _called_ an empire, but it wasn't an empire in the same sense as the British empire; if Britain had been feeling particularly grandiose they could have called Queen Anne the Empress of England and Scotland as part of the Act of Union on a similar basis. Sweden's was also not a modern colonial empire; it economically did not work at all the same way.

> Also, there was extreme poverty in Norway and Sweden not that long ago (the 19th century), leading many to emigrate to the US.

I mean... there was in the UK, too. For the most dramatic example see the Great Famine in Ireland, but there was extreme poverty all over the UK.

Any single colony may have been irrelevant but the colonial world order was and still is relevant. All the western countries that you listed got advantage of participating in the looting, slave trade, resource extraction etc. either directly or indirectly. Even today, the western life depends on e.g. child labor in factories and cattle farming that destroys the rainforests - elsewhere.

And how did the UK acquire the strength needed to take those colonies? Would-be conquerors are a dime a dozen, empires as successful as the British not so much

I mean, I don't think "well, they used to have a big empire" says that much about the current state of the country. Shift the dial around a century or so, and you hit at least three other Best Empire countries (Spain, Portugal, Netherlands). I think the British empire is particularly memorable because it was basically the _last_ one (pedantically, shreds of the Portuguese one held on for a bizarrely long time, but the British one was certainly the last one to peak).

it's also probably memorable because it was the largest empire in human history with like almost a third of the world in its possession? It's arguably one of the most influential

What you refer to as strength is not potent anymore: you can surprise uncontacted peoples only once, and nowadays there's UN, the Geneva Convention etc. to stop such dehumanization that enabled the colonizations.

Most colonies back then had no big picture view of the world. They had no idea what tactics were being used against them and were hyper focused on their local situation. Internecine warfare within Europe and trading across the world gave the merchant companies training and advantages that no one else in the world had. Things are quite different now.

Good topic for a book me thinks.

There is a book on precisely this. Uncommon wealth: Britain and the aftermath of empire.

It wasn’t just pillaging. I think the UK success was because they figured out arbitrage opportunities that no one else in the world could. That was because the rest of the world turned inwards.

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