The size of France and the financial resources of Spain made those countries powers in Europe. The efficiency of the Netherlands achieved the same thing. All three presented England with a continual challenge, since she lacked the size of France, the foreign endowments of Spain and the efficient institutions of the United Provinces. England had to seek a middle ground. Early in the seventeenth century she began to construct a New World empire in defiance of Spain. During the course of the century, England attempted to quarantine the Dutch on the one hand and to imitate the property rights and institutional arrangements of the Netherlands on the other. By 1700 England had succeeded, and early in the next century supplanted the Dutch as the most efficient and rapidly growing nation in the world.

However, there was little indication during the sixteenth century that England would follow the path to successful economic growth. England during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had also undergone the travail associated with the reduction in the powers of the barons. The country had engaged in the Hundred Years War and suffered the War of the Roses with the attendant disorders, rebellions and maladministration of justice. Yet Henry Tudor's victory at Bosworth Field in 1485 did not bring the Tudor dynasty the absolute control over the power to tax that was achieved in similar circumstances by the Crowns of France and Spain.