Erm, British management is also famously terrible.
Coal has horrible externalities and its demise is a good thing.
British iron ore is not very rich, and it never was; Britain has imported iron ore since the 19th century. Given how cheap it is to ship iron by sea, it's very hard to justify using low-grade ore that has to be moved by rail.
Because of the large size of the manufacturers, a medium-size country will only have a couple of them, leaving it vulnerable to mismanagement like what happened at British Leyland, AMC, Chrysler, Nissan, ...
It wasn't terribly clear how rights became extinguished by time for Thomas Littleton, who published his "Tenures" in 1481 or 1482. In chapter 38 of the first Statute of Westminster (3 Edw. I, c. 38) of 1275, they put time limits on various writs.
"It is Provided, That in conveying a Descent in a Writ of Right, none shall [presume] to declare of the Seisin of his ancestor further, or beyond the time of King Richard, Uncle to King Henry [III], Father of the King that now is"
Which is to say, 1189, 86 years earlier. Other writs were limited to the voyage of King Henry III in Gascony (1230?), and others still to his coronation in 1216.
Now according to [1], other limitations were put under Henry VIII, until the act of 1832, where they made it clear that its limitations were the ones to use, and not the old standard of the reign of Richard I, from the Statute of Westminster.
It's also the case that the US is much larger than France, so the kind of world where 400 people in New York really mattered stopped existing.