Well that's a load of shyt. The wealth and prosperity of Europe and North America was built off three things:
1) Slave labour. You can get a lot of shyt done when you don't have to pay the workers on the project a single cent. Have your business humming. Make nothing but profit. Any successful business today needs to spend at least 40 to 50% of turnover on paying employee salaries. No employees means no salaries, means you pocket the extra 40-50% year in year out.
2) Human trafficking. Both then and now a very profitable enterprise. The Trans-Atlantic slave trade was a licence to print money for the countries and their elites involved in it, even before you factor in point 1. You could make a fortune just by being the middle man. Obviously this is now illegal and no modern nation can make its fortune by human trafficking.
3) Narcotics trafficking. Just like human trafficking, insanely profitable 300 years ago just like today. Except back then they only had opium. They hadn't figured out how to make heroin yet, and they also hadn't figured out how to mass cultivate cocaine. So it was just the poppy flower and its raw opium. But that's more than good enough, it was the most potent drug known to man besides tobacco and sugar, and it was more expensive than both. Again this is now illegal. No developing country can make a quick come-up for itself by dedicating some of its farmland to poppy and coca plant production.
You walk around the streets of the City of London - the part of the city where all the big buildings are, the big institutions, the government buildings, the corporate headquarters, the stock exchange, that type of shyt, where the money and the power resides to this day - and you will see nothing but monuments to drug dealers and human traffickers. Nothing but buildings financed by pimps and dope pushers.
The whole prosperity and "success" of European and North American nations is based on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and on the Indo-Chinese opium trade. They'd force India to produce poppy, to the point where there were so many famines because there was simply not enough farmland growing food crops and too much of it growing poppies.
And then here's the real beauty part, they'd force China to buy it at gunpoint. The Chinese were no fools, they knew opiate addiction was destroying their country and they banned it in 1799. They made it illegal to possess, import, and sell opium in the country. The British and French and Americans in response fought three Opium Wars against China, literally forcing them to repeal that law and make it legal to import opium once again.
Not even Marlo from The Wire was that ruthless of a drug dealer that he would force customers to cop his vials of heroin at gunpoint. But the British and the French and the Americans certainly were ruthless enough to do just that. And that's how they made their fortunes.
Again none of these options are available today to the poor, developing countries of Africa, Asia, and South America. They can't make a quick come-up because the ways to do that are illegal now. The Europeans first gorged themselves with the proceeds of crime, then to seal the deal they changed the rules so that it would be impossible for someone else to copy them. They'll go to war with you and put you in jail for breaking the same laws that they themselves ignored to make their own countries great in the first place.
