The process as spelled out by a number of thinkers including Sir Thomas More (who was observing some of these things first-hand) and Hilaire Belloc (who was basing his thoughts on such sources as More) was that the Industrial Revolution in Britain (and hence the world since it started there) can be traced back to the way the confiscation of the monasteries lead to spending up the enclosure of the commons. Basically while the Catholic Church had an effect of spreading out power a bit more away from the state, consolidating this in the hands of the state and in the hands of landlords meant that the landlords were much more powerful and therefore pushed peasants off their land in order to raise more profitable goods such as sheep.

The result was a large number of destitute peasants who ended up in the city unable to support themselves. Some of these were shipped en masse to the New World. Others were given destitute wages in the early textile mills.

The same process starts much later in France where you have a parallel confiscation of the monasteries under an effort of secularization following the French Revolution. Although the Reformation fizzled in France for various reasons, the same political pattern of state seizure of Church lands did happen just as it did elsewhere in Europe and this lead to the same destitute masses forced to the cities.

This process closely parallels the way the Andrew Johnson administration pushed freed slaves into the wage labor system thus revving up the industrialization of the North which was jump-started by the civil war.