The industrial revolution and the birth of the modern economy were not caused by the colonies.
Likewise, the decline of the UK's economy was not caused by the loss of colonies.
Hence a single mention in the article, which discusses many reasons and potential reasons of the decline relative to the US and Germany (Germany never had a significant colonial empire and what it had was lost at the end of WWI).
Perhaps not directly, but the influx of gold and silver from Spanish and Portuguese colonies to Europe would later pump up the economy of other countries - such as England and Netherlands - that would eventually lead to things such as the industrial revolution.
I'd say that rejecting that much of Europe's success during that time was a direct consequence of extracting a large amount of resources from oversea colonies is a common trope in Europe, perhaps for internal political consumption.
I am not going to discuss further since, obviously, this is not a discussion but low value political argument...
Edit:
I would argue that European colonialism and the industrial revolution are both consequences of deep changes and innovations across all domains that started during the Renaissance (which means 'rebirth' in French) and that propelled Europe far ahead everyone else, hence global subjugation on the one hand, and the scientific and industrial revolution on the other.
Portugal and Spain, the first order beneficiaries of the mountains of gold and silver (among other resources) they extracted from America in 17th and 18th century were too busy playing colonialism to do anything else. Other nations in the region that did trade with them reaped the opportunity of having very wealthy neighbors that were happy to just spend their newfound wealth.
Your argument was essentially "nahh, extracting a ridiculous amount of resources from massive overseas colonies had nothing to do with Europe's success".
At which does this stop being the fault of colonialism?
And where do you think the capital to fund all the investment came from? Colonization mostly benefited the elite at the expense of the state and majority of the people, but those are also the people able to invest.
Now, if you meant that beyond the colonies we should not discount the role of obscene profits from slavery, foremost the royal family, then yes, I agree with you.
They didn't manage to build anything modern over it.
Putin's Russia rules over 17 million sqkm which were once conquered by the tsars, and it is an economic backwater.
By some metrics, perhaps.
But consider (per Wikipedia) -
> The mineral-packed Ural Mountains and the vast fossil fuel (oil, gas, coal), and timber reserves of Siberia and the Russian Far East make Russia rich in natural resources, which dominate Russian exports. Oil and gas exports, specifically, continue to be the main source of hard currency.
> Russia has been widely described as an energy superpower;[33] as it has the world's largest natural gas reserves,[34] the second-largest coal reserves,[35] the eighth-largest oil reserves,[36] and the largest oil shale reserves in Europe.[37] It is the world's leading natural gas exporter,[38] the second-largest natural gas producer,[39] the second-largest oil exporter[40] and producer,[41] and the third largest coal exporter.
But having a lot of natural resources is often described as an economic curse: it motivates the country to embrace extractive practices and build extractive institutions, where human lives don't matter and innovation is superfluous. The main avenue to riches and power is control of a mine... by any, often brutal, means.
Looking at Russia, it very much didn't escape that curse. A shocking proportion of highly educated Russian professionals lives abroad.
I would bet that when it comes to sophisticated products with high added value, the Russian diaspora produces more of them than the Russians who are still present in Russia. Perhaps even the Russian diaspora in the Silicon Valley alone does so.
We're just hitting the Find Out stage of the running a world economy on fossil fuels thing.
Oh well. 200 years ain't a bad run.
So successful was the transition of slave labor into sharecropping and tenant farming during and after the war that cotton production actually expanded dramatically.
By 1870, American cotton farmers surpassed their previous harvest high, set in 1860. By 1877, they regained and surpassed their pre-war market share in Great Britain. By 1880 they exported more cotton than they had in 1860.
During the US Civil War cotton volumes went down and mills, mill workers in Lancashire and Cheshire experienced widespread poverty ...
However for a well placed elite few, cotton profits from trade climbed dramatically ..
Despite cotton shortages in England, merchants would sometimes re-export the materials that did arrive to other ports in Europe. Notably, they also re-exported materials from the South to the North, because the Union also struggled from being cut off from direct trade with the Confederacy. As a result, during the war, cotton grown in the Confederacy could be shipped out of a southern port to Britain to evade the Union blockade, sold in Liverpool, and then shipped back across the Atlantic to a northern port, evading the Confederate cruisers.
Liverpool's docks also benefitted as profitable wartime enterprises emerged, particularly the increased trade of commodities such as ships and armaments. The Union's merchant marine, nearly the world's largest in 1860, was devastated throughout the war in part by the Confederate warships supplied through Liverpool. In addition, as a result of the war, cotton speculation and brokerage, rather than trade in cotton itself, became immensely profitable for a number of merchants.
Over a longer arc the cloth trade itself grew in volume and demand for raw fibre increased, absorbing the post Civil War US production again.
You're correct that public sentiment opposed slavery and that unionised mill workers in England supported a ban on non use of "slave cotton".
What also occurred, as often happens in war, is that a profitable black market trade grew and lined the pockets of many middle men, at the expense of growers who had reduced profits and embargos to deal with and for mill workers who saw less actual work as bale numbers plummeted.
It makes perfect sense; you just have to acknowledge that to anyone outside England, "England" and "the UK" are identical in meaning.
England is one country of the United Kingdom. Scotland, England and Wales make up the island of Great Britain, the largest of the British Isles. The UK also includes Northern Ireland. Hence: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island.
I was confused too, thought that Great Britain referred to the archipelago as a whole (excluding Ireland) rather than the largest island.
For a long time I've felt that one of the traditional titles of the Russian czars, "Czar of all the Russias", was cooler than the titles I was aware of for other rulers. I was surprised to find the seal of an English queen on Wikipedia which clearly showed a Latin title translating as "Queen of all the Britains".
The switch from "King of Britain" to "King of the Britains" seems to have occurred during the reign of George III, judging by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Seal_of_the_Realm . None of those include an "all", but I'm sure it was present in the seal I saw.
I'd love to hear the results of you trying that argument in the rougher parts of, say, Glasgow or Swansea. I suspect if you tried it on the wrong person you'd be picking up your teeth with a broken hand.
If you had said "Outside the UK" there might be room to say it's a matter of opinion, but since in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland the vast majority of people would not say England and the UK are the same, your statement is just flat out obviously wrong.
When talking about history, absolutely, because we're talking about three or four different countries at the time, with different kings, governments, alliances, economies and so on.
In the High Middle Ages, it was capable of maintaining pretty expensive wars on the continent without going bankrupt.
The UK as a whole exists only since 1707, and by that time, it was already a major power. Did it have a numerous poor population? Yes, much like the US now does. But that is not the same as being a poor country in the sense that Somalia or Timor Leste are.