Ever since the historically ludicrous (and thus Pulitzer Prize-winning – what can we expect from the organisation that awarded Walter Duranty’s grotesque lies?) 1619 Project, Americans have had to endure being finger-wagged that ‘black people built America’. This naturally begs the question: why haven’t they built Africa, then?
Because the glaringly obvious problem for the woke left race activists is that the West so obviously leap-frogged the rest of the world. Not that the real world has ever bothered the left: after all, they’re still valorising Marx’n’Engels, despite them being wrong about… well, everything.
So, just as they do with the obviously ludicrous theories of Marxism, they simply explain it all away with unconvincing, idiotic, ad hoc excuses. Just ignore the real world, where sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas remained mired in Bronze Age backwardness, while pre-colonisation Australia and New Zealand were still banging rocks together 6,000 years after Eurasia left the Stone Age behind.
Then the white folks came, and catapulted them into a future as far ahead of their own achievements as if Star Trek’s Federation had touched down in Elizabethan London.
They’ve never forgiven us for it.
The biggest historical lie inflicted yearly on millions of white students is the claim that Western civilisation achieved its greatness, industrial economic take-off in the 18th century, and subsequent mass affluence in the 20th century, by conquering, enslaving, and “under-developing” the rest of the world. In reality the diffusion of European technology has been the ultimate factor responsible for development outside the West. Not a month goes by without a headline that Whites “should return stolen lands to Indian tribes”. Another falsehood is that Europeans deliberately introduced slavery into Africa, when they simply made use of an established practice going back a thousand years and were instrumental in its demise on moral grounds.
This nonsense is pushed hardest in academia by books like Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery and Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Both claim the slave trade and colonial extraction were the secret sauce behind British industrialisation and European wealth. The numbers say otherwise.
Economic calculations would demonstrate that the total sums of money invested by slave traders in the process of industrialization amounted to less than one per cent of the total capital invested during the key period of industrialization between 1760 and 1810.
More recent research confirms the same: profits from slavery and plantations were a rounding error compared to the size of the British economy. The real drivers were British farmers, workers, institutions that protected property rights, openness to merit and an explosion of scientific societies applying new knowledge. The left simply erases all that inconvenient white effort and blames everything on exploitation.
The next layer of the guilt racket came from André Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein’s dependency and world-systems theories. They insisted Europe got rich by locking the rest of the world into permanent ‘periphery’ status, sucking out resources while forcing raw-material exports. Once peripheral, always peripheral. The only escape was communism.
Reality laughed in their faces. The Asian NICs – South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore – industrialised spectacularly through the 1970s and 1980s, moving from raw materials to high-tech exports while improving life expectancy and slashing infant mortality.
How could so many academics believe that a transformation – the industrial revolution – so uniquely dependent on scientific knowledge, favorable institutions, and a population with aptitudes, foresight, frugality, and devotion to hard work, was made possible by slavery and extraction of resources, features typically found in numerous societies throughout history, none of which industrialized?
All these arguments are a complete inversion of reality. Rather than causing underdevelopment, Europeans have been the ultimate developers of the world. Without the diffusion of European inventions, there would have been no development anywhere. Geography, governments and culture played supporting roles, but the decisive variable was always the spread of technologies invented in Europe – steam engines, electricity, modern medicine, scientific agriculture... the lot.
Even critics of extractive institutions like Acemoglu and Robinson miss the bigger picture when they downplay the European technological lead. Imperial China was streets ahead of mediaeval Europe – until it wasn’t, dragged backward by sclerotic authoritarianism. The ‘Islamic Golden Age’ was not only mostly a myth: it turned out to be a cheap plating over Bronze Age savagery, which tarnished faster than a jihadi chasing a goat in heat.
In modern times, once-backward Asian states from Meiji Japan to modern China industrialised precisely by importing and adapting European know how, not by inventing it from scratch.
The West didn’t get rich by looting the world. It got rich first, then shared the tools that let others catch up. Sub-Saharan Africa, pre-colonial Americas and Australasia were not ‘underdeveloped’ by wicked Europeans, they were simply left behind by their own civilisational trajectories until European contact arrived. The subsequent leap in living standards, literacy, health and wealth across the former colonies is the direct result of that contact, not despite it.
The real scandal isn’t what Europeans took. It’s what they created and gave away.
