Far right Breitbart News tries to prove that capitalism wasn´t based on slavery or colonialism. Which kind of misses the point even if true.
Note also the following quotes:
>>>The head of Political Economy at the IEA argues that while some select elite families within Britain and other colonial powers profited immensely during the time, such gains were not felt by the public at large, who rather than benefitting were instead steeply taxed to pay the exorbitant costs in extra military and administrative spending needed to maintain and protect far-away colonial outposts.
>>>Niemietz did acknowledge that there is evidence that places in the world that were colonised did experience long term negative effects, particularly areas which were environmentally or otherwise inhospitable to Europeans at the time as they tended to establish authoritarian and “extractivist” forms of government, which when they left served as a power structure for continued poor governance from local elites.
>>>“A history of colonial extractivism, or a period of heavy involvement in the slave trade, made the subsequent development of good institutions less likely. The implication is that colonialism and slavery were not zero-sum games that benefited the colonisers at the expense of the colonised. It was more like a negative-sum game, which hurt the latter without really benefiting the former,” he concluded.
Indeed. Except for those rich elites, of course.
Narrative busted: Colonialism did not make the British Empire rich
