Other countries who had their own cotton resources also tried to start on industrial revolutions -- but they didn't get very far, because England has more guns, and stopped them by force. Egypt, for example...
The same thing also happened in Britain's earliest "experiment" with these ideas, in what was called Bengal, in India. In fact, Bengal was one of the first places colonized in the eighteenth century, and when Robert Clive [British conqueror] first landed there, he described it as a paradise: Dacca, he said, is just like London, and they in fact referred to it as "the Manchester of India." It was rich and populous, there was high-quality cotton, agriculture, advanced industry, a lot of resources, jute, all sorts of things -- it was in fact comparable to England in its manufacturing level, and really looked like it was going to take off. Well, look at it today: Dacca, "the Manchester of India," is the capital of Bangladesh -- the absolute symbol of disaster. And that's because the British just despoiled the country and destroyed it, by the equivalent of what we would today call "structural adjustment" [i.e. economic policies from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund which expose Third World economies to foreign penetration and control].
In fact, India generally was a real competitor with England: as late as the 1820s, the British were learning advance techniques of steel-making there, India was building ships for the British navy at the time of the Napoleonic Wars [1803-1815], they had a developed textiles industry, they were producing more iron than all of Europe combined -- so the British just proceeded to de-industrialize the country by force and turn it into an impoverished rural society. Was that competition in the "free market"?
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[See notes 45-47 at <http://www.understandingpower.com/chap7.htm> for documentation.]