The scale of colonial appropriation was staggering. From the early 1500s through the early 1800s, colonisers siphoned 100 million kilograms of silver out of the Andes and into European ports. To get a sense of the scale of this wealth, consider this thought experiment: if invested in 1800 at the historical average rate of interest, that quantity of silver would today be worth $165 trillion – more than double the world’s GDP. And that’s on top of the gold that was extracted from South America during the same period.
