The countries that were prosperous in 1724 were the ones that had highly developed trade networks and a market full of not-very-constrained individual players.

The countries that were prosperous in 1724 were the ones that had highly developed trade networks and a market full of not-very-constrained individual players. It is precisely by mimicking them that capitalism spread into other nations and pushed out various previous feudal forms, even though the local nobles fought back against the tide for decades and centuries, sometimes managing to stop it for a while. If you take a historical map of Europe in the 18th century and mark various instances of liberalizing legislation on it, you can see the spread quite nicely. It is almost like an ink blotch spreading on a table. The places that resisted the new ideas the most (the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire) and managed to keep their old feudal norms deep into the 19th century were the ones that ended up on the bottom, and had to speedrun industrialization and development in the 20th century under top-down reformers like Lenin and Ataturk.