A Comparative World-Systems Analysis of Settler Colonies in the Hispanic and Anglo Realms

Abstract

The term ‘settler economies’ refers to a distinctive group of societies formed and dominated by white European migrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In sharp contrast to the colonial experience of more densely populated tropical areas, these temperate-latitude societies were clustered near the top of the world income distribution at about 1900. They had risen to this status by explosive economic growth over a few decades within the nineteenth-century world economy. This was an era of growing divergence between rich and poor economies, when most colonial territories were on the losing side as components of a global periphery ensnared in the ‘Great Divergence’ of the world economy that occurred between about 1800 and the late twentieth century.