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Notes -
An anonymous substacker has written up a good piece on the Rise of the West. Essentially, he comes to the conclusion that the divergence began in the 1000-1500 A.D. period and that subsequent colonisation efforts by Europe of the rest of the world was simply an outgrowth of those earlier advantages.
This of course upends the familiar trope of "the West got rich by the backs of the Third World" so popular with leftists in the West and in countries like India, across the political spectrum. I bring this up because if the poor countries of the world today have any hope of catching up, they should first re-examine honestly why they fell behind in the first place. Yet I see precious little of that, except mostly moral grandstanding about the evils of the exploitative West.
This also has domestic political implications because a lot of white guilt-driven narratives are sprung from the narrative that the West got rich by exploitation and thus the logical corollary is that evil white people should repent (preferably through monetary reparations). The narrative that colonisation was simply a natural outgrowth of European pre-existing advantages that grew over time naturally undermines it. One could also note that the Barbary slave trade, or the slave auctions in the Ottoman Empire, shows that the Third World was far from innocent. But of course these historical facts don't have high political payoffs in the contemporary era, so they are ignored or underplayed.
Additionally, southern colonies were significant poorer and worse off compared to Northern ones despite an abundance of unpaid manpower. brains and ingenuity seem to be the most important factors for creating wealth, and second to that, property rights and free markets. Colonialism didn't prevent Great Britain, Portugal, or France from declining either.
In fact northern settler colonies seem to have been wealthier than the mother country almost as soon as they were founded- both for catholic Quebec, puritan New England, Proto-liberal Pennsylvania and New York, etc. And that’s especially striking because Quebec was in most ways more poorly run than New England or Pennsylvania due to trying to preserve feudalism, and lacked the selection effects of New England(if anything they ran the other direction). It’s like European powers understood how to reach a local maximum and consistently set things up to do so when there weren’t preexisting institutions.
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