What made Britain able to establish such a huge empire?

Didn't the 1348 Plague basically act as a massive European retcon? Surely when 1/3rd of your population is wiped out, your existing structures don't mean much anymore. It does seem doubtful that England would have any kind of advance four centuries before they had any kind of importance on the international scene.

England in 1348 was actually quite severely overpopulated. The issue with the plague wasn't so much 1348-1349 itself, but rather that the disease kept coming back. Population decline continued until the mid-15th Century.
 
Pre-Industrial Revolution
  • Having the best navy allowed them to spread their influence
  • Being an island so they didn't have to have a large army to defend the borders

During Industrial Revolution
  • Developing the latest technologies, such as the steam engine
  • Telegraph allowed for faster communications. A study showed that an empire's size was limited to how far messages could travel from the capital within two weeks time. The time a telegraph message took from Britain to Australia could be several minutes to a couple of hours.

Plus:
Being an island meant commerce was overseas, encouraging a trade empire (which developed into a political one).

Having iron and coal, lots of it, and some of it near each other, really really helped get the industrial revolution off to a good start.
Having decent rivers (for water-driven cloth production) and lots of sheep meant the English were early adopters of the first stage (water powered) of the Industrial Revolution that focused on textiles.

Later, controlling India meant that Britain had first claim on most of the world's saltpetre (and thus gunpowder) production for about a century. This is a massively underestimated advantage.
 
Top