RE END OF EMPIRE

There is a lot I can disagree with in the preceding video, but some useful summations from them.

Just one example to take issue with, Smith says Europeans were  more or less as poor as other poor people, globally, under the European Empires.

Authors of  Power and Plenty , page 362, note, however,  that living standards, apart from long distance trade, of poor Western Europeans had already risen well above 18th Century global (Eastern Europe, Asian) living standards, well before the Industrial Revolution, even before the Enlightenment. 

Let's put it this way, successful European empires under mercantilism, and under absolutism, benefited their poorer denizens disproportionately more than non European empires, states, or non empires elsewhere.