> and more to do with the fact that the British were the first people on Earth to invent a way of measuring longitude at sea accurately
...OTH if Britain wouldn't have been a globe-spanning empire, they wouldn't have needed a more precise way to measure longitude, and probably wouldn't have invented it ;)
E.g. the Brits had built a whole government body around the task, which then resulted in a competition, with Harrison's chronometer coming out as winner: