How many, though, and in what ways? That's the actual content of your claim, that certain people acquiring certain freedoms lead to certain outcomes, so it can't be glossed over.
Patents, for one. Access to the courts in a way that the outcome is not predecided by class. No arbitrary taxation or confiscation of property.
If a farmer is considering buying a plow, but the increase in his product will all be taken by his landlord, he won't buy the plow. Nor will he improve his land by building walls or drainage. But if he can keep it, or at least a substantial portion of it, then he will.
That's really the point that I was trying to get to. It was not a sudden 1 step process from 15th century peasantry to the 21st century liberal democracy. But rather it was steps that allowed people, just ordinary people, to keep the extra product of their work, investment, innovations. When people can prosper by doing something better, even if only somewhat so, then they will. When they cannot, then they won't. And maybe this applies to only portions of the population. But even that is going to have a superior result than having only the lords get all the increased product.
The thesis of why nations don't develop is that the elite of those nations have more to gain by not permitting development, and the power to enforce that. And because of that no one is willing to take the risk or do the work.
Now things like the Poor Laws and the labor oppression you and Park is talking about is a push back by the lords who don't want to lose their power by losing their relative wealth. And that can be seen everywhere. Both then and now. Reagan and Thatcher are just part of that universal pushback by elites who loath sharing power and prosperity.
But growing portions of the population could make wealth for themselves. And they did. And the wealth of nations is the wealth of all of the people in those nations. So a growing share of the population which could work and aspire towards wealth means a growing wealth of the nation as a whole.
Now certainly extracting wealth from ever more people, as the chattel slavery plantation system did, also brought a great deal of wealth in. And at the dawn of the industrial era slavery produced more wealth than industrialization and innovation. But the wealth produced by industrialization eventually eclipsed the wealth of plantations.
The 18th century was a starting place. And your argument seems to be that it's not the ending place, so it's not the answer.