Suparna Diwakar

It also bears noting that the European settler colonies benefitted from a massive infusion of land and resources appropriated through the process of expanding their frontiers and dispossessing Indigenous people. In many cases (e.g., the USA) they also benefitted from surplus appropriated through mass enslavement. In the 19th century up to 1/3rd of the USA's workforce was enslaved. They also created their own peripheries: for example, Australia uses weaker countries in Oceania as its own regional periphery, and the USA began using Latin America as a periphery beginning in the 19th century, later becoming the imperial power, developing currency hegemony, and today appropriating massive quantities of value from the rest of the global South through unequal exchange, facilitated by its military power, its patent regime, and its control over international financial institutions. Btw, anyone who claims that the European settler colonies had more "liberal" or "inclusive" institutions needs to grapple with the fact that in reality these institutions were leveraged to justify dispossession, territorial expansion, enslavement and segregation. Inclusive for whom, exactly?

The European settler colonies achieved faster economic development not because they had "better institutions", but because they were actively supported by the states of the imperial core, and purposefully integrated into that core for geopolitical and commercial reasons, which financed their industrialization with surplus appropriated from the rest of the colonial periphery. Furthermore, they were allowed to use state-led industrial policy and protectionism, which was actively denied to the other colonies and post-colonies. In the post-colonial period they were never subjected to Western-backed coups, military interventions, sanctions or destabilization campaigns. And, crucially, they were never subjected to the structural adjustment programmes that were imposed across the rest of the periphery, which dismantled public investment and public services, crushed public research and development initiatives, forcibly deregulated economies, destroyed industrial policy, induced prolonged recessions, and - as Ha-Joon Chang put it - kicked away the ladder to development.