If you get involved in online debates about economic history, it won't be long before someone tells you that the West is rich because it stole the resources of the regions it colonized. This stolen-wealth theory is cited as the reason the United Kingdom and France are rich today, while Ethiopia and Burundi are poor. It also is sometimes used to argue that global capitalism is inherently unjust and that wealth must be radically redistributed between nations as compensation.

The problem is, the stolen-wealth theory is wrong.

Oh, it's absolutely true that colonial powers stole natural resources from the lands they conquered. No one disputes that. And at the time, this definitely made the colonized regions a lot poorer. The U.K., for example, caused repeated famines in India by raising taxes on farmers and by encouraging the cultivation of cash crops instead of subsistence crops. That is a pretty stark example of destructive resource extraction.