What a simplistic view of history! West bad, East and South good. This is every bit as idiotic as the converse: West good, East bad, South as cheap labor. The reality is even simpler: humans are tribal animals—all of us. And like all other animals, we compete for available resources. But as tribal animals with language and hence technological innovation, we have all launched a feeding frenzy on our biological support system called “agriculture” and this initiated a runaway feedback loop of population growth, topsoil exhaustion, and militaristic expansion—the “age of empire” starting wherever agriculture took root: Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Mesoamerica, The Andes, et al. And inevitably, the tribes with the best weapons subdued or annihilated those without the technology to compete, and colonized their lands to grow more food and mine more resources for themselves as their populations exploded. All this was entirely predictable if you know anything about ecology. So we now have a feeding frenzy on the entire planet, and as with any other species, overshoot leads to collapse. So here we are…