I found this discussion interesting and it finally got me to quit lurking and sign-up, especially since the subject seems to be right up my alley.
The OP seems to me to be trying to determine why colonies settled by the English/British appear today to be so much more economically and militarily powerful than those colonies settled by the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French or any of the fringe players in the colonial game (Denmark, Belgium, Germany, Italy).
A number of pertinent observations have been made including the temperate nature of successful colonies, the nature of British Common Law, and the bureaucratic corruption that pervaded other European nations’ colonies, particularly those of Spain and Portugal. But I don’t think that anyone has accurately explained why Britain was so successful in their colonial endeavors in the 18th and 19th centuries. I would suggest that much of it can be attributed to a providential unification of political, military, bureaucratic and social forces.
The simplest way I’ve found to organize the period of colonial expansion is to divide it into ages. The earliest, ca. 1500 – 1600, was dominated by the Spanish and Portuguese. From ca. 1600 – 1700, the Dutch and French are most successful in developing, promoting and expanding colonies. Finally, the period from ca. 1700 – 1850 marks the rise and pinnacle of British colonial development. (Britain can mean many things, but Scotland and England formally and legally joined by the Act of Union, 1707. I understand that the relationship has changed in recent years.)
Although England begins its colonial experimentation in the middle of the 16th century, it’s never able to put its full energies into colonial exploitation until the end of the 17th because, for most of the 1600s, the home front is a mess. From the death of Elizabeth without issue, to the Civil War and Interregnum, to the profligate spending of Charles II and James II, English domestic policy is a mess. Additionally, the English engaged in three costly wars with the Dutch between 1650 and 1674, the last two of which are generally considered English losses. The failure of England in the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch wars may be attributed to the wealth of the Netherlands (largely from to the enormous trade brought in from the East Indies by the VOC, the Dutch East India Company), superior skills of the Dutch commanders (most notably by the Dutch Admiral M. H. Tromp) and the better procurement and logistical capabilities of the Dutch who had learned from their colonial forays how to quickly (and relatively inexpensively) arm, man and provision ships.
The superiority of the Netherlands’ system dealt the English an additional kick in the pants, when, in 1688, during a lull in the near-constant fighting with the French, William, Stadtholder of Holland, in concert with his principal advisor, William Bentinck, put together in less than three months, a flotilla of over 350 vessels, put it to sea (twice) and managed to successfully land an army at Torbay in Devon before marching to London and deposing James II. The English refer to William’s expedition and the Constitution that subsequently came of it as The Glorious Revolution. In reality it was little more than a full blown naval invasion, in the mold of that envisioned by Philip II of Spain a century earlier, that caught the dispirited Royal Navy at anchor and incapable of pursuit, and it was, ultimately, successful.
William III and William Bentinck, who would become Lord Portland, brought with them the bureaucratic and institutional innovations that had made the Netherlands such a powerful colonial force through the 17th century. So while the notion of the Royal Navy overseen by the Navy Board can be traced to the naval construction programs of Henry VII and Henry VIII, they were enormously strengthened after the rise of William and Mary as co-regents. It is, therefore, after 1688 that the Royal Navy in the form so familiar from writers such as C. S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian develops as a powerful arm of the state, capable of building, arming, supplying and manning a navy capable of engaging in world wide colonization as a public part of state policy rather than as support for private, entrepreneurial commercial enterprise.
Innovations brought by the Dutch extend into the army and to private enterprise as well. John Churchill, Lord Marlboro, the first great British general, after all, is successful not only because of his considerable personal charisma, but also because of his understanding of logistics and supply of troops aided by Dutch thinking. In an age when commanders avoided field combat, Marlboro through superior supply and maneuver, combined with a fearless approach to battle, managed an impressive series of victories during the early stages of the War of the Spanish Succession.
The rise of “John Company,” the British East India Company, can be seen as another legacy of the Dutch. Although John Company had its founding at the beginning of the 17th century, it becomes a critical piece in the growing British Empire only in the 18th century through its colonial holdings in South Asia. It does this by applying many of the institutional techniques perfected by the VOC and combining them with an army privately trained and funded, and made up largely of troops raised in Asia.
So, the success of British colonial enterprise can be attributed to a providential convergence of personalities, technologies and fortune. Once William III arrives in England, there is relatively little friction between the Dutch and the English for nearly a century, until the American Revolution when the Forth Anglo-Dutch War breaks out and the Royal Navy essentially blockades all of the Netherlands for three years demonstrating its clear superiority. In the century between the Glorious Revolution and the British settlement of Australia, Spain and the Hapsburgs cease to be the wealthiest and most powerful rulers on the continent, the French became the bogyman for the rest of Europe and for the British in particular, the British establish themselves more prominently in Africa and Asia, manage to evict the French from the North American continent, and finally, manage to lose their most valuable colonies following the American Revolution.
But the history in itself does not explain the OP. I think that colonies must be divided into new world and old world. In new world colonies (I include Australia, not because of geography, but because it was settled by Europeans relatively late in the colonial period and has more in common with American colonialism than Asian or African), Europeans ultimately killed off most aboriginal inhabitants through either disease or superior technologies. In such places natives became a minority dominated by Europeans and their institutions. In former English colonies (The United States, Canada, Australia), these appear to be more successful today than those brought by the Spanish and Portuguese (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina), because I think they matured better. Perhaps it has something to do with religion, the power of Enlightenment thinking on society and the changing notion of the relationship between the individual and the state that grew in states born from English colonization. Perhaps it has something to do with a difference in the entrepreneurial spirit British/English settlers brought with them. Probably it has something to do with a combination of factors. The notion that English colonists came permanently, whereas Spanish simply came to make money before returning is a gross oversimplification.
Nevertheless, the national and religious background of colonists appears to have had little to no effect in Asia and Africa, areas where Europeans never grew to be a majority in the colonies they developed. Mozambique, Congo, and the Philippines don’t appear to be appreciatively better off than Indonesia, Bangladesh or Kenya. And India, the largest democracy in the world, and clearly enormously rich in human capital, nevertheless suffers enormously for its overpopulation. It’s unclear to me whether colonialism there was beneficial or detrimental. And if you decide it was good, can you say that British contributions to India were more important than those of the French? The Portuguese? The Dutch?
And who can forget the Japanese. The Dutch established a trading factory at Nagasaki in 1571 that lasted into the 20th century. And besides their little flirtation with militarism in the middle of the last century, they appear to have turned out okay, right?
And Kadji, I have always hated them damn tohers myself, whether they be black brown or white, male or female, we need to get rid of them, or else otherwise…