Historic revisionists, progressives and Marxists like to depict the West as this terrible force that plundered anywhere it set foot, stealing and conquering anything it touched with no remorse and no regard for human life.
The truth is that the West was this weak, poor and less numerous force but used technology, cooperation, speed and strategy to defeat the totalitarian, numerous and wealthy East that was a looming threat.
It wasn't our weaponry that gave us the Roman empire, it was our Western individualistic egalitarianism caused by our Indo-European battle tactics learned as pastoral radiers that made them hand over Rome to us as we were looked favorably upon by Romans who prefered our way of doing things over their own.
We haven't spend 500 years conquering the rest for money, we spend 500 years dragging everyone else out of their ignorance, mysticism, poverty, hunger, disease and totalitarianism because we felt it was the right thing to do because of our objectivity, our willingness to debate, our learned science and the unique Western solution to the problems of politics, market which is the product of our need for consent from our peers instead of blindly obeying a chosen leader.
We created individual property rights and the high trust society and spread it through the world, we gave women property rights for the first time in human life while we were at it.
We created the Hanja line with the Lotharingian kingdom at the bottom but England and Scandinavia at the top.
Our Protestant ethic was created out of the encouragement of the working class to adopt the ethics of nobility which we then fought among ourselves for to spread.
We did not steal, people handed us their methods, tools, ethics, philosophy and discoveries on a silver platter because we made the world better for everyone with them and often succeeded in where they had failed.
Culture matters, ours is not equal but ours is the best and the most unique culture to have ever existed.