… we begin to understand why some tropical countries responded swiftly to the growth of world demand after 1880, while others did not. Response was swiftest where new land was available for cultivation, whether by large or small farmers, and where the government removed obstacles to access (ownership, transportation, irrigation) … The fastest growth would be found (just as in the temperate zones) in areas with new land plus immigrant labour (e.g. Malaya, Brazil, Ceylon) or areas with access to new land and surplus labour time (Thailand, Burma, Colombia, Gold Coast). The slowest growth would be in countries where little new land was cultivated, whether because the population was already dense (India, Java) or because the government did nothing to break the land monopoly (Venezuela, Philippines).

Rapid export expansion in regions of recent European settlement and in important parts of the eight tropical countries had in common the geography of a moving frontier. In the New World migrant labour and foreign capital were drawn to this frontier as complements … But in the tropics migrants could be attracted to frontier areas for no more than a subsistence wage plus some mark up rather than a European standard of living as required in the New World. An important reason why foreign capital did not flow to the eight tropical areas to seek cheap migrant labour was that this labour was so cheap as effectively to substitute for capital so long as natural resources were highly abundant and used in large quantities.