This is a huge question. Understanding the history of colonization, and how nations became powerful through it, is in general very complex, but I can give you a general reading list relating to how colonial powers developed- sadly I have nothing to offer on England specifically.

James M. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (Guilford Publications, 1993).

Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1974), 67-129.

David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (Norton, 1998) (Please read critically- some big issues with this book in following scholarship)

Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Greenwood, 2002).