It seems like almost every other European empire (Spain, Portugal, France, The Netherlands, etc) left behind nothing but poverty stricken third countries. Only British colonies like the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand achieved strong development after their colonial statuses. Even former British colonies that are classified as developing do better than their neighbors. Just compare South Africa and Nigeria to the rest of Africa.
Why have Britain's former colonies done so well whereas most (if not all) other former European colonies are still struggling?
Why have Britain's former colonies done so well whereas most (if not all) other former European colonies are still struggling?
Nope. This is not true. In the first instance, there are former French, Dutch and Spanish colonies that are doing well. And other former colonies of those empires that are now doing poorly. And in the second instance, while it is possible to cherry-pick some former colonies like the United States, Canada, Australia or New Zealand that have extremely high Human Development Index scores, there are other former colonies like Gambia, Sierra Leone, Malawi and South Sudan that have extremely low scores.
By the same token, if we look at 2019 Human Development Index scores we can see that former french colonies like Seychelles, Algeria and Tunisia are doing better (!) than Nigeria or South Africa. And on the other hand, there are countries like Chad and Niger that have the lowest scores.
For Portugal too, we see high variance between fairly-well-off Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau right next door!
And we have to remember that these development figures can change drastically over time. Zimbabwe in 1990 was a country with a very high quality education and health care system, strong farm sector and a growing economy. By the year 2010 Zimbabwe's economy faced hyper inflation and there was drastic decline in the farm sector and de-industrialization.
All of this is to say that 1) the British did not have some secret formula that made them better, kinder colonizers who built better institutions. That's nationalistic nonsense.
Development scholars and economic historians are not sure about the path-dependency hypothesis. Acemoglu and Robinson say that colonial era institutions set countries along the path to post-colonial success or failure. However, that discounts the whole post-colonial experience and plenty of examples of reversal of fortune.
the British did not administer all their colonies alike. Some colonies like Canada, New Zealand and South Africa were established as settler colonies with responsible government (i.e. the colonies had their own elected parliaments and became dominions quickly). Some colonies like Malaya or North Rhodesia (Zambia) were established as resource-extracting mining or plantation colonies. Then there were those like Uganda or Nigera which were "peasant colonies" where power in rural areas was devolved to Warrant Chiefs, which created a system that Mahmood Mamdani calls "decentralized despotism".