More of the Spanish colonial effort was more directly extractive. Spanish immigrants of the 16th and 17th . centuries came to Mexico and Peru in order to get wealthy. Though women and families did immigrate, most of these were single males, and the extraction was of gold and silver by native peoples and, soon enough, also by imported African slaves. So, the Spanish colonies had an elite transfer: the ruling class changed, the large native population mostly stayed . ..(unless it died from imported disease or was killed off, like the Caribes.)

The North American colonies, on the other hand, were not so directly extractive. Europe and England had an agricultural economy, good arable land was the basic form of wealth, and that land was in short supply, in the home countries. English , Dutch, Finnish immigrants came in as men, women and families intending to acquire land and settle. However, although that settlement was not just a transfer of elites, it was not what you could call inclusive. It required displacement- or elimination- of the native peoples. That could have been hard to do, as early North American colonies were generally quite fragile, with a high mortality rate from starvation or disease. Fortunately for those first colonists the diseases that had come with the Spanish almost a hundred years earlier had already wiped out enormous numbers of the native peoples. When the Pilgrims arrived and set up their Plymouth colony, in 1620, they found plenty of space on a shore that, just decades earlier, had been filled with native settlements.

Those North American colonies were also largely funded and founded by companies of investors, and were intended to be profitable . If gold had been found in Virginia in 1609 ( and plenty of Jamestown settlers wandered into the woods hoping to find it) it would have been mined. Very soon, valuable commodities were identified and exported, like tobacco in the Chesapeake, cod from the St John's Bank, even things like tall pines for shipmasts. So those colonies were , in their own way, also extractive. And by design: colonial industries and crafts were discouraged: colonists were to be sources of raw goods, and in exchange were to get finished goods, like guns, blankets, pots and pans.

And there were English colonies more directly extractive like the Spanish ones. In the 18th c., the real money was made not in North America but in the Caribbean. There, an English settler would hope to create a sugar plantation, fit it out with African slave labor, put it in charge of an overseer, and then head home to live the comfortable life of a Nabob. And if the life of a Native American working in the Mexican silver mines was very brief, the life of an African slave harvesting sugar cane in Jamaica was equally so.

There were political consequences. The great wealth of the English Caribbean colonies was a barrier to their joining the revolt in the north, when they were invited to do so in 1776. The elites in the Caribbean colonies had- and depended upon- a large British army presence to control their huge slave population and had no interest in launching a rebellion against it. And the British government would have never allowed those lucrative colonies to slip away, anyway, as it did for the rebellious, less-profitable northern thirteen.