Explains how a small island in north Europe with a weak military and flagging economy is on the UN security council.
Unironically, yes this is how capitalism works. If you have resources, you leverage those resources to produce goods and services that increase your total wealth. If I were to walk into a bank and steal a couple million dollars, maybe I could leverage that money into a successful business. Maybe so successful that it produces inner-generational wealth, so that my great-great-grandchildren are on average more wealthy than they would have been otherwise. I may have "earned" this money with my hypothetical business skills, but it doesn't change the fact that I only had the opportunity because I stole the money.
So yeah, many enterprising individuals took land and resources (and plenty of slave labor) from the Americas/Africa/Asia for hundreds of years, and were able to leverage those resources into even more wealth, thus people in London have more money, thus taxi drivers make more money.
The value of the UK economy, since around 1930, has increased in PPP terms by about 90%. So there's a reasonable argument the value in 1930 was partly down to imperialism, although I think industrialisation was a much bigger factor. Still, the 90% of our economic value we accrued since then certainly didn't come from colonialism, so where did it come from?
Look at Japan, yes it had an empire for a few decades before WW2, but that was mainly a result of industrialisation that had already happened, not a cause of it. Look at what's happened in China since it opened up and liberalised it's economy. At least they finally, finally figured this out.
How did your African country get all this modern tech that you didn't work towards to invent? How are you using the internet? You must've stolen it.
Maybe some countries simply have a good flow of education --> production --> exchange high quality goods for currency.