I get the impression a lot of the success was just providing some sort of rule of law and military security and then letting markets do their thing along the lines of Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market. (Scot who did some study at Oxford and died in 1790).
The old British Empire was hardly a an exemplar of free market economics. There were many independent companies but there were also chartered monopolies and price controls. We take basic economics for granted today but back then many leaders literally didn't understand the basics of how it worked.
