Britain became wealthy because of the Jewel in the Crown, the East India Company, and then India as a Crown Colony. Slavery to sustain the colonies with ports needed to protect the SLOCs to India were part of that. It was a whole system. At the same time a lot of the people subsumed into the colonies were a whole lot better off because justice was administered using British Common law which was far superior to anything else in the world and geve the subjects, forced or unforced, much more personal security than the arbitrary and capricious arrangements elsewhere. It is noteworthy that one of the features of the modern US administrative state is the effort to uttelry undermine and discplace the common law to make government about the adminstrative state vs the people with the administrative state superior as opposed to just the King’s Justice in settling disputes between subjects equitably. Decriminalization of felonies against persons is antoher aspect of that abandonment of justice for the people.
Don’t forget The Hudson’s Bay Company.
“Britain became wealthy because of the Jewel in the Crown, the East India Company”
For a time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company