Of course slavery, colonialism, did not produce the Industrial Revolution

Nor are slavery and or colonialism the cause(s) of current wealth.

Now, if you want the detailed calculations there’s a source:

Slavery and colonialism did not make Britain rich, and may even have made the nation poorer, a new study has found.

The riches of the slave trade were concentrated in a few families while the nation footed the bill for extra military and administrative spending, according to a book by Kristian Niemietz at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

“Profits earned from overseas engagement were large enough to make some individuals very rich, but they were not large enough to seriously affect macroeconomic aggregates like Britain’s investment rate and capital formation,” he said.

Mr Niemietz argued that that the slave trade had little overall impact on the economy or the country’s ability to industrialise.

The Full Monty is available here.

It’s also possible to approach this with some simple logic. Everywhere had slavery. Many places had colonies. Only some places got rich. There’s therefore - obviously and clearly - something else which caused the getting rich. It’s certainly possible to say that the other thing was that societal change which led to the profits of slavery and or colonialism (to the extent that were those were large enough, if that’s what someone wants to try and argue) being effectively used to produce an Industrial Revolution made the difference. But that then is to insist that it was the societal change, not the slavery nor colonialism, which made the difference.

For example, the Arab slave trade lasted longer than the Atlantic by many centuries, was larger in volume and human misery. The Arab colonisation process covered all of North Africa, large non-Arab areas of the Middle East and reached up into Spain for centuries. Yet near no modern Arab nation is or has become rich in the absence of fossil fuel deposits.

It’s not the slavery or the colonies that produced an industrial revolution nor modern wealth. QED.