What is the difference between the colonies in North America and the rest? How would things have been today if all continents were as helped as North America?
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Where they helped or did they just have a head start with independence? For example, the USA kicked out the British nearly 200 (170ish) years before India did.
They didn’t “help” North America so much as do their damndest to supplant the existing population and replace it with their own, using whatever means they could think of. Smallpox blankets, destruction of resources, the removal of entire tribes in death marches, and bounties.
I’m not a professor but they were trying to get to Asia and bumped into NA. It wasn’t in the plan but it had so many great things they went back and got the funding. It had to do with support from Kings and the ability to develop. I’m not entirely sure they knew they other continents were there. You have to think about ability to prosper.
North America is a lot closer and had more room since 95% of the Native population was murdered with smallpox and invasion
By the time of Columbus’ first contact with North American peoples, Africa, Europe, and Asia had been in contact for centuries. This meant that all three had shared and adapted to the same diseases. So when European colonization of Africa began in earnest, the indigenous people were much more numerous and resilient.
In contrast, the indigenous population of North America was heavily reduced by disease before colonization really got going. This meant that the colonists faced much less competition from the indigenous people for land and resources, which made colonization much, much easier.
There’s a difference between settler colonialism and extraction colonialism. North American colonies were settled, which led to industry developing on site, so raw materials were used locally and finished products were shipped out in trade. African and Asian colonies were focused (and still are, even though we don’t call it colonialism) on extracting resources to be used in the colonizer’s industry, then re-sold back to the colonies.
So, what we see today as “less development” is really just the aftereffect of colonizers robbing their colonies blind for a few centuries.
They didn’t help the North American colonies at all. They decimated the local population of natives (American Indians) to the point where they barely existed by the end of the 19th century. They then repopulated the land with their own kind. This didn’t happen anywhere else on the same scale.
It might help to think of it in modern terms.
Imagine the United States decided to colonize Antarctica (where there are no people). We’d take people from our existing population, dump them in Antarctica and make a new nation. Your expectation would be that this new nation would have institutions, technology and productivity along the lines of the U.S. – after all, that’s where all the people came from.
Now, imagine the U.S. decides to build a military base in Afghanistan. On that military base, you’d see American norms prevail. But outside of that military base, the local norms would prevail – the people would have the institutions, technology and productivity of the local Afghan population rather than the American population.
This is precisely what happened during the Age of Colonization. Where the Europeans transplanted large numbers of colonists who had the intent of settling in a new land, those nations became ‘European’. Where the Europeans merely created trading outputs, those nations retained their local characteristics.
Nor was it really a matter of ‘helped’. There was never really much intention to “elevate the savages”. The people doing the colonizing – whether as settlers or merely traders – were mostly just looking out for their self-interest. While the local populations would inevitably gain a great deal by associating with the Europeans, this was merely an unintentional side effect.
Below is a VERY simplified version of 500 years of history.
The Spanish found gold, silver and emeralds in South America, and were primarily interested in looting those materials from the natives, often through enslaving natives and Africans. They also expected their own lower-class workers to work for essentially minimum wage while minting and transporting piles of money. Naturally, these people stole and accepted bribes, creating a culture of corruption that the area is still battling.
In North America, France was the primary European influence in what is now Canada. These people were largely single men who trapped fur animals and traded with native people for more furs. They did not settle or farm. Instead, the took the fur down the Mississippi what is now the city of New Orleans, where they sold it. Then they went north and did it again.
What is now the US was settled by the English, who sent people who wanted to be farmers. These people brought with them the traditions of English representational government, which they tried to reproduce in their new home. This gave them the “help” that you are referring to.
Some good answers here but for Africa in particular, it wasn’t colonized how we typically think of colonization. This answer mainly applies to the British but what they would do is go somewhere and look around. The tribes there have been at low level war with one another for probably hundreds of years so they hate each other anyway.
Then either a missionary shows up (sometimes they are the first one) and converts a tribe. That tribe is now in contact with the British Empire via Christianity. That tribe then gets picked to be the leader of the area Britain has claimed. Otherwise they just pick a tribe and give them weapons and they conquer the other tribes and get to be the leader.
The British didn’t particularly care how things were ran as long as the in charge tribe made sure things were working in a orderly fashion. Many places might see a white guy show up once a year as a colonial administrator to check on things.
Mostly it was just some army people at an outpost at the end of a random river or mountain range so politicians could point to a map and say “this is part of the British Empire”.
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