Only one country succeeded in modernizing its property rights in this period: England. The Glorious Revolution resolved the conflict between landowners and the Crown by handing the country to the landowners. One might expect this to have produced an oligarchy that jealously guarded its privileges. But the landowners, precisely because they were empowered, did something their continental counterparts could not. They dismantled the fossilized property arrangements that had blocked development elsewhere, and in doing so, set the stage for the Industrial Revolution.