[thedevil]

Slavery hasn't been a factor for a century and a half. Natural resources play a meaningful role, but there's plenty of poor countries with resources. And the indigenous people before didn't have a juggernaut economy from those resources.

Slavery and a stolen continent are horrible, but they don't explain what happened economically.

[pizza]

In a goldrush, sell the pickaxes. Black men and women picked the cotton for free in captivitiy. Cotton fueled the textile industry. The textile industry blew up because of the industrial revolution. It's just rent-seeking by threat of murder. No, it doesn't explain who had what before this happened, but this is the clearest 'difference that made a difference' to me w.r.t. why America became rich in a very noticeable way while this was occurring.

The slaveowners made profits for nearly no work, and the banks made plenty of profit by giving out loans to the slaveowners to buy more slaves, too. It's hard to look for causality, but this seems like an obvious source of far-removed consolidation of capital that would last over time.