Former African colonies aren't poor, and France, UK rich because of wealth theft. Or are they?

F you get involved in online debates about economic history, it won’t be long before someone tells you that the West is rich because it stole the resources of the regions it colonised. This stolen-wealth theory is cited as the reason the U.K. and France are rich today, while Ethiopia and Burundi are poor.

It also is sometimes used to argue that global capitalism is inherently unjust and that wealth must be radically redistributed between nations as compensation. 

The problem is, the stolen-wealth theory is wrong. 

Oh, it’s absolutely true that colonial powers stole natural resources from the lands they conquered. No one disputes that. And at the time, this definitely made the colonised regions a lot poorer.

The U.K., for example, caused repeated famines in India by raising taxes on farmers and by encouraging the cultivation of cash crops instead of subsistence crops. That is a pretty stark example of destructive resource extraction. 

It’s also probably true that this stolen wealth helped much of the West get rich.

Limits of stolen-wealth theory

Of course, Western countries didn’t simply consume the resources they plundered—the global economy isn’t just a lump of wealth that gets divvied up, but rather relies on the productive efforts of individuals, companies and governments.

The U.K., for example, was able to industrialise not by consuming spices confiscated from India, but because its citizens invented power looms and steam engines and other technologies, and because its people worked very hard at factories and plants that used those technologies. 

But steam engines and power looms and other industrial machinery required raw materials like coal and rubber as inputs.

When those materials became less expensive, it became cheaper to substitute machines for human labour. That means that some of the resources stolen from colonies probably did give Britain and France part of the boost they needed to jump-start the industrialisation that eventually made them wealthy. 

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http://mgafrica.com/article/2016-01-01-former-african-colonies-arent-poor-and-france-uk-rich-because-of-wealth-theft-or-are-they