Have a look at Sheila Newman, Demography Territory Law 2: Land-tenure and the origins of Capitalism in Britain. Building in part on Ellen Meiksins, 2002,, The Origin of Capitalism, a longer view, Sheila Newman, finds that Britain had a confluence of coal, iron and masses of land-less labour, the latter due to the system of primogeniture brought by the Normans. Without the peculiar British land-tenure system there would not have been the land-less labour. Without the land-less labour, there would not have been workers for the mines and the industries. The Netherlands had a similar revolution, but it fizzled out, due to diminishing peat and maybe due to losses incurred during the European tradewars (which Britain won through industrialisation). There was a Dutch diaspora to Britain between 1550 and 1700, bringing a lot of technology and displacing more of the British. France had a Roman-law system which did not create land-less labour. The British had to work for land and capital to survive. The French were able to work for themselves or in small industries. The French had a democratic revolution because they were locally organised, in contrast to the poor English who were constantly on the move looking for work and who could not organise sufficiently to overcome the wealthy beneficiaries of the British system, who made the law. For instance, Cromwell pretended to lead a popular revolution with promises of land etc, but he let his followers down. Also, the French feudal system had survived the plague better than the English one, so the French (especially the Bretons) were able to use vestigial obligations to get the King to listen to them. (He subsequently set his army on them and things turned violent). Henry VIII liberated himself from Papal dues and cashed in the monastery land in return for redistributing it to bourgeois British as gold and silver flooded in from the new world. The embourgeoisement of Britain probably assisted new industries to the extent that non-gentleman owners of landed estates were able to use this land for non-agricultural uses. The Reformation saw the confiscation of usufructual land-tenure for single titles, which were then cashed in and the subsequent economy ‘justified’ through Pareto Superiority theory.
