Eastern Europe is not as rich as the west, but is not all that far behind -- Poland has the GDP that the UK had in about 1987 (says google). And of course got deeply massively trodden on in a way that certainly wasn't colonialism, rather more recently than most ex-colonies.

The East India companies were indeed large for their time, the biggest companies ever until canals & railways got invented. But it's hard to comprehend how small the scale of commerce was then, the sum of all long-distance trade was a few containers. Enough to make a few well-positioned men very wealthy indeed, they built some nice mansions. But not countries.