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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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.
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