So in the end of all of this discussion we are more or less agreeing on reality.

No. You are describing the appearance. I am pointing to the essence.

Europe is actually richer because it was smarter, better governed and more innovative.

This is pure idealism (a fairytale). Ideas do not float above material conditions. Innovation is not spontaneous. It is produced by specific relations of production. Britain did not control half the world because of superior governance. It controlled half the world because it had accumulated capital through enslaved labor, stolen land, and plundered resources. That capital funded the railways, the factories, the universities you credit for “innovation.” To reverse this is to confuse effect for cause.

Colonialism is a consequence of being richer, innovative and better governed, not a driver.

This is a core error. Colonialism was not a side effect. It was a primary mechanism of primitive accumulation. The enclosure of commons, the transatlantic slave trade, the extraction of rubber, cotton, minerals, these were not incidental. They were foundational to the rise of European capital. The periphery was not “left behind.” It was actively underdeveloped to serve accumulation in the core. Again you should read Walter Rodney.

No, the material record says that most important drivers for early Germany industrialization were coal and steel, railways, chemical and electrical engineering and agriculture.

Yes. And where did the capital for those railways come from? Who bought the chemicals and electrical goods? German industry developed within a global system structured by colonial extraction. The “10% of GDP” argument is a fetish of the statistic. Capital is not just raw inputs. It is profit, reinvestment, market access, financial infrastructure. All of which were shaped by colonial relations. To isolate one variable is to ignore the totality.

There is nothing forced in China neocolonialism for example. That is pure foreign investment exploitation.

This is propaganda slop. Chinese investment operates differently. No structural adjustment programs. No conditionalities demanding privatization, austerity, or deregulation. No regime change tied to loans. Debt renegotiations happen without military intervention. That is a material difference. It does not mean China is “pure.” But to equate it with Western neocolonialism is to ignore how power actually functions in each case.

Western capital extracts through institutions it controls: IMF, World Bank, WTO. These enforce rules that reproduce dependency. Chinese capital operates through bilateral contracts. The mechanism matters. The outcome is not identical. To conflate them is either ignorance or bad faith.

Why does the world let them do it? Do you think that this was not the same as the time Rome, a city state in the middle of Italy, controlled the entirety of Europe and Nord Africa?

False equivalence. Rome was a pre-capitalist empire extracting tribute. European colonialism was capitalist imperialism restructuring entire economies for accumulation. Different mode of production. Different logic. Different relation to the periphery. Conflating them erases the specificity of capitalist exploitation.

You are not wrong that companies and recipient countries accept FDI. But acceptance under structural constraint is not consent. It is survival within a system not of their making. That is not a defense of the system. It is a description of how power operates.

You are an idiot for peddling this “smarter Europe” nonsense (one level removed from phrenology style nazi race science). The facts are not on your side.

I’ll say again you really should read Lenin on imperialism, Fanon on colonial violence, Walter Rodney on how Europe underdeveloped Africa, Kwame Nkrumah on neocolonialism, Samir Amin on unequal development, Aimé Césaire on the dialectic of civilization and barbarism, CLR James on the black Jacobins. After that you may have enough of an understanding to have a proper conversation instead of what you are doing now.