I haven't heard this before, do you have sources where I could learn more?
We didn't steal that wealth from Africa, in part because Africa had very little wealth.
I don't have a great link laying out this in more detail, but I know Johan Norberg has written and talked a fair amount about this.
Since you don't offer any evidence for this scenario, I can't really refute it :)
But note that 90% of Africa didn't even get colonized before 1884. That was over a century into the Industrial Revolution era, during which Western Europe had roughly doubled it's population and tripled their GDP.
I don't interpret the OP comment as restricted to Africa - e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encomienda in Spanish colonies.
Looking to the future, I'd prefer colonialism not be considered a lucrative strategy (though the thesis doesn't deny that colonialism was profitable for specific interest groups - just that those groups were a small part of the newly industrializing economies, and that the nation-level balance sheet gained little from their pillaging, compared to the costs of empire-maintenance).
Circumstancial evidence includes:
1. Having natural resources is often bad for development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
2. Scotland is in the UK because it tried to do colonialism, bankrupted itself and had to sell itself to England.
2. Ireland and Finland are doing as well as any other European country but never colonized anyone and were themselves colonized.
Colonialism is basically just a distracting game countries played before economic growth was invented.
"Our hypothesis is that Atlantic trade—the opening of the sea routes to the New World, Africa, and Asia and the building of colonial empires—contributed to the process of West European growth between 1500 and 1850, not only through direct economic effects, but also indirectly by inducing fundamental institutional change."
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jrobinson/files/jr_AERAtla...
Where has he argued the opposite?
he's probably grasping to "research" from before the 30s, if even that, expect to ignore elites and focus on average country gdp nonsense.
