The three you listed are all settler colonies; they are the product of large scale migrations of people from Great Britain (and Europe) who settled down and claimed land.

Settler colonies tend to differ markedly from just administrative colonies in terms of investment They have stronger links back to the metropole and have greater access to financial tools like loans, markets, and banks, more access to higher eduction, legal protection, and security/protection. The minority white administrators who settled in India, Nigeria, or across the Pacific were often on temporary assignments and uninterested in settling full time in the colony- and few others were either. Commercial agents may have come and some may have stayed for quite some time, but without a mass migration of settlers there was little permanent colonial society set up and so less was invested in the sort of infrastructure that settlers usually demanded. Not to mention the highly radicalized discourses that dominated during the 19th and 20th centuries- some were not so sure it was even possible to educate or employ native peoples for more than the most menial bureaucratic positions.

Being a settler colony also lends itself to the creation of a shared identity- or an imagined community for those who live in the colony. Nigeria-India-Pakistan- these are not places that had or even have coherent national identities. There is not necessarily a shared history or historical experience with which the population identifies- or at least, not on the same fashion as the Australian or pakeha colonial experience helps to inform the identity of people who live there. A shared identity helps provide stability and predictability- there are no large scale ethnic/tribal/caste/religious rivalries like we might expect to find in a nation artificially carved out and imprinted on a landscape of preexisting peoples.

• Headrick, Daniel. The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940. OUP, 1988.

I think Headrick gives some good ideas on why particular technologies or developments were not widely exported or made available to non-white populations- something that helps explain some economic disparities.

• Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Adas is along those very same lines- looking at racial discourses and technologies.

• Lake, Marilyn and Henry Reynolds. Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

A good look into the sort of imagined white brotherhood that existed between settler colonies and metropoles. Helps to explain why investment and assistance flowed to the settler colonies on greater scales than administrative states.

My mind is blanking on a good one about settler colonialism that fits in this theme- its on the tip of my fingers so I will update this when the book I'm trying to remember inevitably comes to mind.