Colonial wealth financed European industrialization, which then drove mass emigration

Evidence

The wealth accumulated in Western Europe through colonial exploitation provided capital for the industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In turn, the social dislocation caused by industrialization led to mass emigration to North and South America and Australia. The USA is generally seen as the most important of all immigration countries, with an estimated 30 million people entering in the peak period from 1861 to 1920. At first migration was unregulated: anyone who could afford the ocean passage could seek a new life in America. Racist campaigns led to exclusionary laws to keep out Chinese and other Asians from the 1880s. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3850

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the ‘Grafting & Growth’ article’s interest in how colonial extractive economies built the industrial world — a causal chain worth reusing. — connects to: Racial slavery and indentured labor made metropolitan Europe wealthy long before globalization. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 92
• SEED: An article angle: the irony that colonial riches caused the very mass migration the receiving nations later criminalized with exclusionary laws.