Are there post-1700 examples of large scale long term reductions in living standards?

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This appears to be quite eurocentric and built on assumptions of development: if we reference 'after the industrial revolution' does that mean we want to exclude large parts of Africa, Asia or Pacific colonies for much of the last 300 years? Are small Pacific islands 'industrialised' even now?

If on the other hand we just set the start date globally at 1700 or 1800 then would Rapa Nui count?

Similar but worse to first contact in America, where at least standards of living generally increased for settlers but generally decreased for natives, while on the Easter Island it just went all downhill, almost completely for much more than 50 years. The first contacts disrupted the social fabric by bringing diseases, then taking people away into slavery, then church and 'modernisataion'/'westernisation':

On Easter Island itself, by the early 1700s the peak population of approximately 12,000 that might have been attained in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had perhaps shrunk, because of possible starvation and malnutrition leading to sterility, to as few as 6,000 souls.
— Steven Roger Fischer: "Island at the End of the World The Turbulent History of Easter Island", Reaktion Books: London, 2005.

Note that this was accompanied with the toppling of the famous Moais between just 1770 and 1774. The entire 19th century is then a series of downward events leading to the almost complete desctruction of that society:

Destruction of society and population
A series of devastating events killed almost the entire population of Easter Island in the 1860s.

The period 1862–88 is the second most important in Easter Island’s history. In the first nine years, approximately 94 per cent of the population perished or emigrated – one of the Pacific’s greatest human losses.

Only in 1862 did the island start to suffer a ‘relentless process of modernization by Western agencies’, which, as a result, transformed its culture and bioscape profoundly and fundamentally. The ‘Great Death’ of the 1860s had been only the final gasp of that living corpse that Easter Island’s ancient culture had already become.
— Fischer

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The prime example in the recent times is communist countries where living standards of millions of people deteriorated for decades. The proof of this is the mass starvations in Soviet Union in 1921, 1932-33 and 1946 when millions of people died. Nothing on this scale happened in the Imperial Russia. Same applies to China and Cambodia/Kampuchea. I suppose that the living standards in many Eastern European countries also deteriorated with establishing of communist regimes, though this may not be so evident as in the cases of Soviet Union, China and Cambodia.

Ref. Black Book of Communism

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