I never claimed it was luck. I merely pointed out the mechanism of acquiring the riches. Eg most people in the US have no idea much of the East Coast was built with money from the Chinese opium trade, and how many of our “elites” got their start as basically drug cartel members. There’s lots of this in the history of any empire. You just have to dig a little - the empires don’t like to talk about how they made their first trillion
In the case of Britain, it was the following (and more):
- be colonised by the Romans 2000 years ago
- spend the next 1000 years rediscovering and (eventually) surpassing the Romans' achievements
- invest heavily in education (when the Incas were building their monuments, most of Oxford University had already been constructed) and subsequently have 1000 years of cumulative effect of those investments
- be highly connected to Western Europe, with all the continual advancements shared between countries all trying to outdo each other
- be an island nation, with a seafaring tradition that was accelerated by all of the above to the point of being the best in the world
That happened after they got powerful. It is like the Mongol invasions of Europe and China, they didn't become powerful from those invasions those invasions happened since they were powerful.
