/edu/ - Education

It kickstarted capitalist growth at the expense of the common people.

There never have been any single entity called "Europeans". Your question makes no sense.

>>11838
Congratz, you won the playing dumb awards. Your dumbass medal is in the mail.

>>11840
Do you know how history works? If you want answers, especially with sources, you will have to be more specific. Do you expect anons to dig up all the ledgers of every company and court ever involved in colonialism and aggregate a grand total for you? Don't be dumb.

>>11841
I am, believe it or not, referring to Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, Italy, Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. You know, the countries everyone usually thinks about when the subject of European colonialism comes up.

It brought them quite a lot of wealth. Though, more for some than for others (ex: Portugal X Spain),

i've always been skeptical of financial measurements as anything beyond illustrative.
stealing our examples from those used for free trade: imagine Britain colonizes portugal. It sends over billions of pounds worth of cloth to make nice clothes for all their imperial administrators, and nice British flags for their subjects. Meanwhile, it extracts billions of pounds worth of wine from portugal.
theoretically, the net effect is neutral - Britain took billions of pounds out, and put billions of pounds in. in practice, however, this obscures that portugal faces few disadvantages in producing cloth while nature poses difficulties for British wine.

it's easier to draw out some of the impacts of this by changing the example: imagine a hypothetical country with no oil spends billions of dollars on a military presence to extract millions of dollars worth of oil. even taking a strictly financial view, this ignores that the true benefit to the colonial power is not the millions of dollars of oil itself, but the (for argument's sake) billions of pounds of domestic economic activity that the oil makes possible. in effect, a loss on the colony is recorded at the border even though it's ultimately economically essential.
(then there's a question of distributional impact - all of Japan probably benefitted from yanking a ton of food from their colonies, while if you're talking about the extraction of precious gemstones and the like then that flows primarily to the wealthy. when you just put a monetary figure on it, this is less clear and you wind up tempted by a crude $/person calculation of benefits.)

It made rent and monopoly profits for the aristocrats and some well-connected bourgeoisie through the mercantilist system, but not through pure capitalism

It was mostly "unprofitable" in the sense that it cost national govts more than it brought into the coffers. Govts and parliaments were filled to the brim with bourgeois who wanted to fill their pockets, however, and they did that to a large degree. Colonialism was basically a form of massive corporate welfare and it worked very well at generating growth due to free resources extracted by free labor for metropolitan industry to manufacture into finished/intermedian goods. Note the difference between Europe and the US, where slavery in the South kept the Southern aristocracy from being interested in large-scale industrial development as was happening in the north

>>11849
So you are saying it wasn't profitable for the countries as a whole, but for the individual capitalists engaging in colonialism?

>>11840
No that anon is right. You are engaging in analytical nationalism. The calculation elites do when going to war is an economic one, but their frame of reference is not the nation. Once you frame the question in terms of nations, you have to accept an answer in terms of nations. And the answer can easily be: No, the costs for the nation exceed the benefits for the nation, so this war or that war must have been about freedom and liberty after all and not material gains.

read Open Veins of Latin America and Capitalism and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present

>>11852
No, his reply was pedantic and the other posters were able to give an appropriate answer.

>>11849
National governments were made possible by colonialism. The bourgeoisie stuffed their pockets and amassed enough wealth to challenge the rule of monarchs, leading to the invention of nationalism and the nation state.

This is why OP's question make absolutely no sense. Colonialism lasted several hundreds of years and is still alive in some forms today, it involved countless parties with conflicting interests, and you want some dumb simplistic answer with concrete evidence for it.

>>11857
No, I don't want a simplistic answer. I welcome thorough and nuanced replies. I phrased my question in a broad manner because I don't know much about the subject yet. Hence I won't even know where to draw a distinction.
Now sperg out elsewhere or answer my question.

>>11853
It is a good book but even the author later buried it
>[Las Venas Abiertas] intentó ser una obra de economía política, solo que yo no tenía la formación necesaria
>[The open veins] tried to be a work of political economy, just that I didn't have the necessary instruction
https://archive.is/snJSD#selection-3271.111-3277.90
>It makes little sense to me that europeans would have commited for so long if it wasn't proffitable
It was, but for a class, not for the whole. The peasant and the worker as a class gained many benefits from the contact but not profits. Not even counting the destruction of capital that involved the periodic global war between kingdoms in that era.

>>11836
Colonialism was very profitable in the beginning and middle phases, but in the late phase the European powers got wrecked by attempting to maintain their colonies.

Colonialism was very profitable for the trading companies and monarchies that drove it. The fact that it also hurt people from Europe at times doesn't mean it wasn't driven by profit. The problem with framing things this way is it ignores the actual economic and political structures that drove the process (mercantilism and capitalism) in favor of spooky ghost stories about nations and the clash of civilization. Stories which were invented by the colonizers btw, so good job on decolonial theorists failing to decolonize their minds.