Part One: The Pattern

For five centuries, wealth extraction followed a consistent logic. European powers built ships, armed soldiers, sailed to distant lands, and took what they found—gold, silver, spices, human beings. The mechanism was straightforward: superior violence applied to populations who could not resist, resources flowing back to enrich the metropole. Spain emptied the silver mines of Potosí. Britain drained India of textiles, grain, and treasure. Belgium extracted rubber from the Congo through a system of terror that killed ten million. The pattern was always the same: identify a population with resources, establish control through force or manipulation, extract until exhaustion, move on.

When formal colonialism became untenable after World War II, the extraction continued through new mechanisms. Neocolonialism operated through unfair trade agreements, structural adjustment programs, debt traps, and the threat of military intervention. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank replaced colonial administrators. Multinational corporations replaced trading companies. The violence became less visible but no less effective. Resources still flowed from periphery to center, from the global South to the global North, from the many to the few.

But a problem emerged. There was only so much to extract from populations that had never been allowed to accumulate wealth in the first place. The developing world was being exhausted. Meanwhile, an unprecedented concentration of wealth had accumulated elsewhere—in the pension funds, home equity, retirement accounts, and savings of the developed world’s middle class. Here was a population with resources worth extracting: not mineral wealth buried in the earth, but financial wealth accumulated over lifetimes, stored in accessible institutions, protected by laws that could be rewritten.

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