As part of an answer on another question, by /u/mynameisnotmiles I shared a bit from a book I am rereading now.
For a course on environmental history at Utrecht University we read some works on the subject, notably one by John McNeill, Something new under the sun, an environmental history of the twentieth century (2000). In the chapter on politics and environment he mentions that prior to the 60's and 70's environmental policy was haphazard. There were not much central ideas on how to properly organise society around the environment. Note however that this discludes ideas of forest and wildlife rejuvenation that had been prevailant for centuries. On the grand level of political ideologies, McNeill writes, the stance towards nature can be well described by the words of Marx; '"the exploitation of man by man" [was given] way to "the exploitation of nature by man"' (p. 332). Nature was something that had to be harnassed and used. That did not mean that it was to be treated carelessly. Ordnances on forest preservation are reered towards wood production, laws forbidding the use of certain areas can be seen as religious practice and decrees on hunting or fishing quota's can be seen as an effort to control 'the commons', as written by Garrett Harding in his 1968 article.

On economic prosperity dependency, what I can say is that oil, wood and other natural resource extraction has been one of the greatest parts of european colonial presence. McNeill writes on a companies, such as Royal Shell-BP in Nigeria. Such practise has been going on since the Belgian ivory trade in present-day Congo, or even diamond extraction in The Rand.
From an environmental history p.o.v. the exploitation of natural resources has been going on for a long time, but has been somewhat curbed since the second halve of the 20th century. The residue of this exploitation however can be found in the way natural resources are treated, namely as owned by the ones extracting it, thus creating skiff balance of economic prosperity in many places around the world. McNeill cites the Marshall-Plan after ww2, the World bank, Asian development bank and others as the driving forces behind unscrupulous environmental exploitation (2000; 322).
This does not really answer your question, now that I reread it, but maybe it can help put things in perspective?

Could I ask a related question? Looking at the ex-colonies in Southeast Asia, there seem to be 3 categories:

Places which were all about resource extraction, such as the plantations of Java.

Places which existed to ship the resources back to Europe, such as Jakarta.

Places which existed as trading hubs, such as Hong Kong and Singapore.

Is it fair to say, how the ex-colonies developed after independence is somewhat dependent on where they fit into their colonial masters' "business model"? And of course different European nations would have had slightly different "business models". If so, does this have parallels in Africa, too?

Well one just has to see the UK and its economic development. I do not know much about the colonial situation in Africa but for Asia, in particular the Indian Subcontinent, it is quite clear that resources that were extracted by the British colonial administration was used to build up wealth back home in the UK.

The common excuse that the British built railroads to help the Subcontinent is false and that these railways had two purposes. Firstly, to expedite material goods to the home country and secondly to rapidly respond to incidents which threatened the power of the British. Most of the taxes and wealth that was extracted from British India made its way out to the UK rather than being spent on the Indian subjects, albeit this wasn't the case if they had to spend money for British subjects which led to the foundation of summer residences such as in Shimla, Dejarling, or Dehradun.

This also led to the economic collapse of many native born industries in return for the establishment of British industries. Materials such as Cotton, which was grown in British India, was sent off to the UK to be process and made into cloth, which would then be sent back to India to be sold to the people there collapsing many local industries which had done the same thing for years. Gandhi's Salt incident can also be shown that the British wanted the colonial population to buy only British Salt rather than gathering their own native sources of salt. Industry, unless it was in the interest of the British, was not supported leaving much of the wealth of India to go outside of India to build up colonies elsewhere and build up institutions in the UK.

These institutions such as The School of Oriental and African studies was primarily founded, through colonial wealth, so that resources could be better extracted by colonial administrators trained there. The museums also serve as a testament to the exploitative nature of British colonialism.

I would not hesitate to say that without the colonies of the UK cities such as London and elsewhere would not exist as they do today.

Sources: Empire: How Britain made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson, The Colonial Empires from the Eighteenth Century by D.K. Fieldhouse, Opium: A History by Martin Booth, and A Concise History of Modern India 2nd Edition by Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf.