Europe’s greatness is a story written in blood and theft
Europe’s greatness is a story written in blood and theft. We are told of the Renaissance, of the Enlightenment, of the Industrial Revolution, as though they blossomed from the sheer genius of a continent uniquely gifted. What is left out—systematically, almost religiously—is the fact that Europe’s wealth was not only created at home but extracted from abroad, ripped from the veins of peoples who did not look like Europeans and lands that did not belong to them. Without colonization of the Americas, Africa, India, and the Pacific, without slavery and plunder, Europe would not have risen to dominance. It would have imploded inwards. The French, English, Germans, Poles, Italians, Russians—so imperialistic, so restless, so hungry—would have cannibalized one another. And in truth, even with the world at their feet, they almost did.
From the beginning, Europe was over-saturated with ambition. After the Middle Ages, its kingdoms were compact, crowded, and bristling with armed nobles desperate for conquest. When Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, he was not just chasing an exotic dream—he was providing a solution to Europe’s oldest problem: what to do with its surplus of violence. The discovery of the Americas became a release valve. Instead of butchering one another over strips of farmland and succession disputes, Europe exported its bloodlust overseas.
The Spanish conquest of the Americas was the first great act of European cannibalism deferred. Within decades, entire civilizations—the Aztec, the Inca—were reduced to rubble. At Potosí in present-day Bolivia, Spanish overseers forced Indigenous workers into the silver mines under conditions so lethal that millions perished. The silver that poured from Potosí between 1550 and 1650 amounted to nearly half the world’s total supply. That river of metal kept the Spanish monarchy afloat, funded European wars, and allowed other nations to rise by parasitism on Spanish bullion. Without it, Europe would have remained a provincial backwater, trading with Asia on terms it could barely afford. Instead, it became the global center of finance, commerce, and war.
But empire was never a collective European enterprise. It was a competition, and it kept the nations from turning entirely on themselves. England and France fought for supremacy in the Caribbean, in India, in North America. The Seven Years’ War of 1756–63, sometimes called the first true world war, was fought simultaneously in Europe, Africa, India, and the Americas. At stake were not only European borders but the control of entire continents. By winning Canada, Bengal, and dominance at sea, Britain ensured its rise as the world’s superpower. Yet one should not mistake this for peace: the same nations that slaughtered each other at Plassey or Quebec were still eager to duel on the battlefields of Europe whenever opportunity allowed.
Britain’s domination of India stands as one of the starkest examples of plunder as lifeline. Economists have estimated that between 1765 and 1938, the British extracted wealth from India equivalent to $45 trillion in today’s money. This “drain of wealth,” as Indian nationalists called it, bankrolled Britain’s industrialization. The railroads in Manchester and the ships in Liverpool ran on Indian cotton, Indian taxes, and Indian famines. Every ton of tea sipped in London was balanced by the hunger of peasants in Bengal, where the Great Famine of 1770 killed ten million, many while grain was exported to Britain. If Britain had not drained India, it would not have had the capital to industrialize as it did. And without that industrial power, its ability to dominate Europe itself would have been crippled.
France, too, found its lifeline in empire. The French Caribbean colonies of Saint-Domingue and Martinique were among the richest pieces of land on earth in the 18th century, producing sugar with the labor of enslaved Africans under conditions so brutal that life expectancy was measured in years. It was this wealth, not the musings of philosophers alone, that allowed Paris to style itself as the capital of enlightenment. Later, in the 19th century, France plunged into Africa, seizing Algeria in 1830 and eventually claiming vast swaths of West and Central Africa. French officials boasted of a “civilizing mission,” but the real mission was extraction: rubber, ivory, palm oil, and forced labor.
Belgium, a tiny European kingdom, became a grotesque parody of this logic in the Congo. King Leopold II turned a territory 80 times the size of his homeland into his personal estate. The demand for rubber in the age of bicycles and cars led to atrocities of staggering cruelty: villages burned, women raped, children mutilated, men worked to death. By the time international scandal forced Leopold to relinquish his “Congo Free State” to the Belgian government in 1908, millions had died—some estimates place the toll at 10 million. Belgium prospered; Congo bled. Without Congo’s rubber, Belgium would have been irrelevant in European politics. With it, Brussels became a miniature imperial hub.
Even the settler colonies were crucial in stabilizing Europe. The United States absorbed millions of surplus Europeans who might otherwise have fueled revolutions at home. Italians, Irish, Poles, Jews, Germans—wave after wave left the old continent, reducing social pressures and channeling discontent into conquest of Native land. Australia and New Zealand played similar roles for Britain: emptying prisons, relocating poor whites, and creating spaces where British identity could reproduce at the expense of Aboriginal lives. Canada became another safety valve. By scattering its own excess populations onto foreign soil, Europe postponed class conflict and political collapse.
And yet, for all this outward violence, Europe still turned inward with devastating consequences. The Napoleonic Wars consumed millions of lives. The Franco-Prussian War sowed seeds of hatred that flowered into World War I. And the First and Second World Wars themselves revealed the truth: empire had not cured Europe’s disease of self-cannibalization, it had merely delayed it. With most of the globe already carved up, the continent’s old rivalries exploded. The bloodletting of Verdun, the Somme, Stalingrad, and Auschwitz was Europe finally devouring itself, even as it dragged the rest of the world down in flames.
The irony is that Europeans spoke of “civilization” as though they were its bearers. But what civilization requires systematic robbery? What culture thrives only by enslaving others? The Enlightenment philosophers—Voltaire, Locke, Kant—wrote of liberty and reason while investing in or justifying colonial exploitation. The Industrial Revolution is praised as a triumph of human ingenuity, but its fuel was cotton picked by slaves in the American South, rubber from the Congo, and opium forced onto China. Europe’s greatness was never self-contained; it was parasitic.
When the colonies began to slip away in the 20th century, Europe collapsed. Britain staggered out of India in 1947, bankrupt. France fought brutal wars in Vietnam and Algeria and lost. Belgium quit Congo in a rush. Portugal clung to Angola and Mozambique until the 1970s, leaving behind devastation. Europe without empire was reduced to a provincial peninsula, its nations dependent on American protection and Marshall Plan dollars. The United States, itself a settler empire fattened by conquest and slavery, inherited the mantle of hegemony.
The historical lesson is brutal but simple: Europe’s expansion was not a sign of unity or genius, but a desperate measure to prevent implosion. The world was Europe’s safety valve. Potosí’s silver kept Spain alive. Bengal’s wealth bankrolled Britain’s industrial rise. Caribbean sugar fed France. Congo’s rubber made Belgium matter. Native American land absorbed millions of Europe’s poor. Every colony postponed the moment when Europeans would slaughter each other for dominance. And even so, two world wars proved that cannibalism was only delayed, never prevented.
Strip away colonization, and Europe as we know it vanishes. No Versailles, no Vienna, no London, no Berlin in their imperial pomp. What remains is a fragmented, quarrelsome peninsula, rich in ambition but starved of means, devouring itself in endless wars. The French, English, Germans, Poles, Italians, Russians—wolves circling the same small territory. Empire allowed them to feast on others first. Without it, they would have feasted only on themselves.
References & Citations
- Utsa Patnaik, Estimating the Drain of Wealth from India during the Colonial Period, Columbia University Press, 2018 (estimates $45 trillion loss from India to Britain).
- John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (on Potosí silver and Spanish empire).
- Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (on global GDP shares, silver flows, and colonial plunder).
- Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (on atrocities in Congo).
- Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (on British policies and Indian famines).
- Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (on Europe’s dependence on imperial expansion).
- Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (on slavery, cotton, and industrial revolution).
- C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (on Saint-Domingue, slavery, and French Enlightenment).
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