1608 as the capital of New France in what is now Canada.
The consequences of this economic expansion for
institutions were very different for England than for Spain
and France because of small initial differences.
Elizabeth I and her successors could not monopolize the
trade with the Americas. Other European monarchs could.
So while in England, Atlantic trade and colonization started
creating a large group of wealthy traders with few links to
the Crown, this was not the case in Spain or France. The
English traders resented royal control and demanded
changes in political institutions and the restriction of royal
prerogatives. They played a critical role in the English Civil
War and the Glorious Revolution. Similar conflicts took
place everywhere. French kings, for example, faced the
Fronde Rebellion between 1648 and 1652. The difference
was that in England it was far more likely that the
opponents to absolutism would prevail because they were
relatively wealthy and more numerous than the opponents
to absolutism in Spain and France.
The divergent paths of English, French, and Spanish
societies in the seventeenth century illustrate the
importance of the interplay of small institutional differences
with critical junctures. During critical junctures, a major
event or confluence of factors disrupts the existing balance
of political or economic power in a nation. These can affect
only a single country, such as the death of Chairman Mao
Zedong in 1976, which at first created