In addition to the example-specific refutation above, i think you've got the causality backwards. It was because they were technologically advanced that they were the ones who ended up on top. Without that, the looting wouldn't have been possible. If China or India or anywhere else had been the ones to become so technologically dominant that they could compel most of the world to submit, they would have. (And in this particular case, those technologies also made it easier to traverse the globe and project force thousands of miles away.)
First, I'm not denying that colonial acts were frequently violent and amounted to looting. Of course they were.
Second, Europe wasn't special in this regard. The expansion of Islam, the Mongol conquests, the Ottoman Empire and the Mughals - all were basically stronger societies destroying weaker ones, looting their wealth for the conquerors, and putting the conquered people to work for them. Yeah, sometimes spreading religion was also a goal - the European colonizers claimed and believed they were civilizing and converting "savages" too - that doesn't mean they weren't also looting. (And converting "heathens" by the sword is *at least* as violent as looting).
Third, the reason why it was Europe who looted the world, and not China or the Ottomans or some other group was because of technological superiority driven by those cultures of freedom I talked about. They unbound the pace of technological advancement, and that made them capable of dominating the world with a mere fraction of its population. (Industrialization and capitalism are the only social systems which have increased per capita GDP in the history of the world, and are intimately tied to the pace of technological advancement AND adoption by society).
So those world-renowned monuments that you claim were being raised - they were being raised for political elites on the backs of slaves or near slaves from their own societies. Local elites were looting their own societies - as has been done since the dawn of human civilization.
Fourth, yes, it feels weird to talk about cultures of freedom while those same cultures are looting and sometimes enslaving people worldwide. Societies have always divided those it considers members of itself from outsiders. It is only in extremely modern times that we've started to consider all humans worthy of dignity, and although you can find strands of such thought in literature going back centuries, that doesn't make it common belief that would drive the action of societies. So anyway, these nations had cultures of freedom domestically, while they exported violence because they were technologically superior and could. I would note that those same cultures of freedom are the ones that ended the colonial regimes - resistance abroad and at home were driven by the colonizers own cultural ideas and lofty ideals.
Churchill is a case in point. He believed only in Democracy for Britons, his societal group, and advocated monstrous measures against colonized peoples who resisted (including the Irish). And yet, the principles he believed in for his own people were ultimately turned against him and used to argue for freedom for the colonized. "This, in turn, led to the great irony of Churchill's life. In resisting the Nazis, he produced some of the richest prose-poetry in defence of freedom and democracy ever written. It was a cheque he didn't want black or Asian people to cash – but they refused to accept that the Bank of Justice was empty. As the Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote: "All the fair, brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended." Churchill lived to see democrats across Britain's dominions and colonies – from nationalist leader Aung San in Burma to Jawarlal Nehru in India – use his own intoxicating words against him."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...e-dark-side-of-winston-churchill-2118317.html
Those same cultures of freedom are the only reasons we don't have a world of colonial empires today, because the people who lived those cultures came to believe those ideals were meant for everyone, not just their neighbors.
Edit:
It's hard to avoid talking about how the game can better adhere to history if we can't discuss the history we're trying to adhere to.
