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Introduction to Modern Economic Growth suffrage, something that did not arrive in Britain itself until 1919 Another telling example is that of the Puritan colony in Providence Island in the Caribbean While the Puritan values are often credited with the arrival of democracy and equality of opportunity in Northeastern United States, the Puritan colony in Providence Island quickly became just like any other Caribbean slave colony despite its Puritanical inheritance Similarly, even though the 17th century Dutch had perhaps the best domestic economic institutions in the world, their colonies in South-East Asia ended up with institutions designed for the extraction of resources, providing little economic or civil rights to the indigenous population These colonies consequently experienced slow growth relative to other countries To emphasize that the culture or the religion of the colonizer was not at the root of the divergent economic performances of the colonies, Figure 4.13 shows the reversal among the British colonies (with population density in 1500 on the horizontal axis) Just as in Figure 4.6, there is a strong negative relationship between population density in 1500 and income per capita today With respect to the role of Europeans, Singapore and Hong Kong are now two of the richest countries in the world, despite having negligible numbers of Europeans Moreover, Argentina and Uruguay have as high proportions of people of European descent as the United States and Canada, but are much less rich To further document this, Figure 4.14 shows a pattern similar to the Reversal of Fortune, but now among countries where the fraction of those of European descent in 1975 is less than percent of the population–thus a sample of countries in which European values or culture cannot have much direct effect today Overall, the evidence is not consistent with a major role of geography, religion or culture transmitted by the identity of the colonizer or the presence of Europeans Instead, differences in economic institutions appear to be the robust causal factor underlying the differences in income per capita across countries Institutions therefore appear to be the most important fundamental cause of income differences and long-run growth 198