GDP Share Isn’t Historical Prosperity

Using a country’s slice of world GDP to claim it was 'rich' confuses population scale with living standards—especially in agrarian economies where output mostly tracks headcount. Prosperity claims must rely on per‑capita measures and better‑grounded data, not headline shares from speculative reconstructions. — This reframes popular colonialism and nationalism narratives by replacing slogan‑friendly GDP‑share charts with per‑capita, evidence‑based benchmarks of historical living standards.