Considering that the most advanced economy in the world did not even exist at the onset of the colonization era (and did not catapult to its status until the past century), I think you're over-reaching!
>Though statistically that is not very convincing: the ingredients of capitalism, i.e., market economy and democracy would lead to prosperity
Really?
Can you name a single modern large scale society at all that experiences prosperity without market economy? I did not say 'democracy' -- this is an economic discussion of how capitalism, and not communism, creates prosperity. I struggle to find a non-market-economy communist system that creates mass prosperity.
We Americans sometimes look back to Boris Yeltsin's infamous trip to America in the late 1980's: http://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-...
It wasn't correlation to Mr Yeltsin, whose faith in communism was destroyed by walking through an American grocery store: it was causation. “I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the American" and I'm willing to bet there are those in China who agreed prior to the liberalization of the economy and the introduction of market capitalism.
You're right on this one. I shouldn't have put words into your mouth by mentioning it.
> Can you name a single modern large scale society at all that experiences prosperity without market economy?
I think you does have a point. Though I would agree with a bit conservation. If we are talking about market economy itself, I consider it a necessary but not sufficient condition for economical prosperity.
In the west you'll find it common to think that Chinese Communism caused the famines and decades of failure and it was their integration of Western Capitalism and reduction of communism that led to their massive increase in industry and wealth.
Which is the same narrative you'll find for the falling of the USSR and Putin's magical rebuilding of Russia.
So many Westerners instead of praising Chinese communists for the success they have, they scold them for waiting so long and killing so many millions before _finally_ listening to what the westerners were saying a hundred years prior: private markets and private control of capital is the only way to build a modern industrious economy and lift subsistence farmers out of abject poverty at efficient scale.
I'm not here to bash China, I just want to express the common views and opinions that I hear on the subject.