What did england need before challenging rival nations in their quest for foreign territories?

This question could be a bit clearer, specifically regarding the time period, but a safe answer is always a powerful navy

England, being an island nation, needed a dominant naval force in order to project power abroad and conquer new territories. They did so in the first few hundred years of the Modern Era, assembling a navy that was vastly more powerful than any potential rival. This enabled England to establish a presence in places ranging from the Americas to Hong Kong to India. 

To form soil, the two processes which must occur are erosion and weathering, so the correct answer is "soil formation is a continuous presses, but also one which takes a long time, it can sometimes take more than five hundred years for 1cm of soil to form.