Ask Europeans why, say, African countries are so much poorer and less developed than we are, and many of the answers will be along the lines of 'because we robbed them blind during colonialism'. On the face of it this sounds plausible, and yet there are some countries which were also European colonies but are doing just fine. Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US (sorta) are all industrialised countries with democratic governments and excellent standards of living. What's up with that?
I've noted some similarities between these countries, but none of them seem to make sense as an explanation to me:
So, do any of the historians here have an idea how to explain this difference? (I know that the above is based on common layman's "knowledge" of history and geography – which is why I'm asking this question and not answering it – so I apologise if any of my premises are wide off the mark.)
Short answer: two reasons - Britain, and the way they were colonised.
Longer answer:
If you are setting out to design a state where the goal, the criteria for success, is long term economic prosperity, one of the major targets you'd aim for is stability. Peace. Look around the world and while it is not universally true, it's true often enough that it's almost a rule: the more peaceful a place is, the more prosperous it is. And these four examples in your original question - the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - have that going for them in spades.
All four have had stable government for over a hundred years. All four have been free of foreign invasion for over a hundred years. All four have been socially cohesive for over a hundred years. That's unusual. Some of that is geography. None of them have particularly belligerent neighbours, and when they have fought wars, they've been mostly fought a long way from home. But some of it is the legacy of the circumstances of their colonial past.
Unlike almost everywhere else colonised by Europeans, these four countries were settled in such a way that the relatively low native populations were swamped by the influx of settlers. Elsewhere, where Europeans (especially the British) settled, a small number of Europeans went into a land populated by many many times their number, and the only way for the Europeans to keep power was via a combination of co-opting local rulers and superior firepower. The British in India, or everywhere in Africa, are great examples of this. In North America and Australasia though, the native populations were much smaller by comparison. Conflict did occur, but the Indian & African examples didn't need to be followed.
This swamping though had another effect. Such large numbers of settlers came to the new lands they transplanted much of their local culture. And that culture was largely British.
While the British may have their flaws, Britain was also one of those lands I described earlier - centuries of societal stability, stable government, not being invaded by foreigners. That stability had, over centuries, created a democratic tradition which the settlers (mostly the poor) bought to their new lands. As well as these democratic traditions, they bought a (mostly) common language, an appreciation of the importance of education, religious cohesion, etc. And they were coming to lands rich with resources which hadn't been exploited too much, unlike the old world.
So what you ended up with in these new lands were societies which were mostly cohesive, with a long tradition of peaceful stability, in distant parts of the world with little risk of foreign aggression. These embryonic nations were all founded around the same time - from the mid 18th century to the mid 19th century - and their transition to modern states has occurred gradually over a couple of hundred years - both a cause and result of the stability which has been a feature of their histories.
(And now, cue someone who'll point out the US breaks a few of these by having BOTH a war of independence, and a civil war, but fortunately, both are a very long time ago)
MIT economist Daron Acemoglu has studied this. He's examined several prominent hypotheses in his and James Robinson's book, Why Nations Fail. They argue that the main determinant of a nation's success is the extent to which they are able to enshrine inclusive economic and political institutions. In other words, the more democratic a nation is, politically and economically, the more likely they are to prosper. However, what leads a country to adopt inclusive institutions is a confluence of all sorts of reasons. Acemoglu and Robinson argue this is why Botswana, a former British protectorate, is far more prosperous that most of its neighbours.
When you talk about post-colonial Africa, you have to remember how recent decolonization actually was. The last British colony (Swaziland) gained independence in 1968, and Portugal didn't give up their colonies until the mid-seventies. The majority of these countries have had less than sixty years of independence.
Australia, on the other hand, began the long process of decolonization in the mid-nineteenth century, New Zealand's first parliament met in 1854, and of course the US has been independent for over two hundred years. Sixty years is probably but not necessarily enough time for a country to recover from the societal and economic damage caused by colonization.
A good example of this is the Republic of Ireland (where I'm from, incidentally). On paper, Ireland had many advantages as a post-colonial state in 1921. They had a strong trading partner in the UK; no enemies on their borders; a stable two-party parliamentary system based on the British model; and existing universities, roads, ports, telegraphs and railroads.
Nonetheless, it wasn't until the nineteen-eighties that the Irish standard of life approached that of other Western European states, and not until the mid-nineties that we reached a level comparable to the U.S. Even with a number of advantages that were unavailable to the African states, the post-colonial development of Ireland took a lot of time.
It's not simply a matter of establishing a democratic government and getting to work. Beyond a small native elite, the colonial powers had no interest in educating the general populations of their possessions, so an entire educational system has to be rebuilt from the ground up. After establishing a government, an entire political system also has to be built from the local level and upward. Moreover, while the colonies had road and railroads, these invariably ran from the interior to the ports, which gave them a limited value. On that note, the sheer scale of colonial resource extraction meant that the newly independent colonies were both far poorer than they should have been and found extraction of the remaining resources more difficult. In Africa, the colonizers often created ethnic and racial tensions amongst the natives, which had be dealt with after independence. Rwanda is most obvious (and horrifying) example of this.
When you have limited infrastructure and resources, a severely under-educated populace, a political system built from whole cloth and artificially imposed ethnic divisions, it can take decades to build a technologically advanced democratic state. In the case of the African continent, this time simply wasn't available.
Independence didn't necessarily mean non-interference. The newly independent African states suffered decades of American and Soviet intervention, often with truly awful results. Mobutu in the DRC, Barre in Somalia and Mariam in Ethopia were all U.S. and/or Soviet backed dictators and kleptocrats. These interventions destabilised not only the countries where they were made, but their neighbours too. While it's possible (even probable) that much of Africa would have gone down this road anyway, foreign intervention by the CIA and the Soviets made this a certainty. It's interesting that Botswana - mentioned as a prosperous nation above - is one of the few states that never seemed to have this kind of outside interference (though the same could be said about Sierra Leone).
I take issue with this recent re-evaulation of colonialism and the almost exclusive focus on the economies of the former colonies. For some, it's comforting to believe historians like Niall Ferguson: that these states are somehow intrinsically failed and have squandered the economic bounty that the colonizers generously left them, unlike the 'successful' colonies. In reality, it takes a great deal of time to recover fully from colonial occupation and African states in particular haven't yet been given the time or the means to do so.
However, if genocide really is the answer, then why aren't the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Latin America rolling in money, security and good governance
Just a nitpick (sorry), but the native genocide in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies cannot even begin to be compared with the English/British (and later American) counterpart in the US or in other countries like Canada. In those fomer British colonies the native population was expelled from their lands and subsequently exterminated in favour of European re-settlements, while this never happened in the Latin American colonies. The natives suffered a lot in the Spanish colonies as well, and millions died of disease and exploitation, but they were never fully displaced: as a result the most modern Latin Americans are the result of the mixing between Europeans and natives.
I think the difference lies in the fact that usa canada Australia and New Zealand were colonized for the sake of settlement where most african colonies were exploited simply for extraction of resources.
There have been a number of attempts at explaining why Africa has lagged so far behind. Unfortunately a lot of them a driven more by political correctness than anything else and don't stand up to scrutiny.
Artificial borders. Well no because many Europeans themselves had artificial borders forced upon them by global powers especially in eastern Europe all the way up to the 90s. They too had people from various ethnic cultures forced into co-existence in newly created states. There were wars and instances of ethnic cleansing but they have recovered reasonably well.
Foreign interference. Again facts on the ground don't back this up. Zimbabwe is a great example. Here is a country that gained independence in 1980 with a leader who enjoyed support from the West and the USSR. The country soon went from the breadbasket of Africa to basket case. South Africa is another. Gained independence after the cold war and is now in steep decline. Both largely free of foreign interference.
The long term effects of Colonialism. Again doubtful. Only 10% of Africa was colonised up to 1870. The vast majority of Africa experienced colonialism for less than a century. Compare that to the Americas where colonialism had been widespread for more than two centuries.
In fact I'd argue what interference there has been in the last two or three decades by former colonial 'masters' with good intentions has done far more damage to the continent than any of the above examples.
As metroxed said, the Spanish and Portuguese colonies weren't, proportionally, nearly as genocidal. Much bigger native populations to begin with, and the colonists tended to be male and married with the natives; English brought their own women. When I was reading histories of Mexico a few years ago, it struck me that the racism there wasn't that different from that in US, but had different effects because of the racial makeup. In the US, refusing or failing to educate non-whites meant wasting under 20% of human potential, while in a country with only 2% pure whites, it'd mean wasting 98% of literacy-dependent human potential.
The Spanish colonies were mostly organized on mercantilist principles around resource extraction, and this tended to be true of tropical colonies (Africa, India, etc.) in general: silver, sugar, rubber, ivory... development of colonial industry was actively discouraged. (We could also speculate about whether Spanish culture was less fertile for industrialization, but I'm not qualified to go there.)
By contrast, the "full of white people" English colonies were settled more for the sake of settlement, and the mercantilist hand on the American colonies was less effective. So there's more domestic industry, and roads and canals and railroads created to serve our needs rather than the export of raw resources.
The American South was more dependent on resource extraction and racial slavery, and, well, kind of resembles the Spanish colonies more than New England in many ways, especially before federally driven electrification and development.
While I don't believe in a British Master Race, I note that in Nigeria and Pakistan, the British did not displace the natives, so your objection there isn't a good one.