ROOTS OF WORLD INEQUALITY
This and the previous three chapters have told the story of how inclusive economic and political institutions emerged in England to make the Industrial Revolution possible, and why certain countries benefited from the Industrial Revolution and embarked on the path to growth, while others did not or, in fact, steadfastly refused to allow even the beginning of industrialization. Whether a country did embark on industrialization was largely a function of its institutions. The United States, which underwent a transformation similar to the English Glorious Revolution, had already developed its own brand of inclusive political and economic institutions by the end of the eighteenth century. It would thus become the first nation to exploit the new technologies coming from the British Isles, and would soon surpass Britain and become the forerunner of industrialization and technological change. Australia followed a similar path to inclusive institutions, even if somewhat later and somewhat less noticed. Its citizens, just like those in England and the United States, had to fight to obtain inclusive institutions. Once these were in place, Australia would launch its own process of economic growth. Australia and the United States could industrialize and grow rapidly because their relatively inclusive institutions would not block new technologies, innovation, or creative destruction.
Not so in most of the other European colonies. Their dynamics would be quite the opposite of those in Australia and the United States. Lack of a native population or resources to be extracted made colonialism in Australia and the United States a very different sort of affair, even if their citizens had to fight hard for their political rights and for inclusive institutions. In the Moluccas as in the many other places Europeans colonized in Asia, in the Caribbean, and in South America, citizens had little chance of winning such a fight. In these places, European colonists imposed a new brand of extractive institutions, or took over whatever extractive institutions they found, in order to be able to extract valuable resources, ranging from spices and sugar to silver and gold. In many of these places, they put in