I've read a few books recently, and one of the things you see is that Spain did focus on trade, but mostly for the Crown and the Crown's favorites. You don't get a rise in banking. You don't get the creation of joint stock companies. You don't get an insurance industry. You don't get a growth of the merchant class. You do get a lot of smuggling.

Whereas, the British and Dutch especially, focused on a less top down form of trade. You get the development of risk reduction institutions like the joint stock company and companies like Lloyds of London that mitigate risk. You get institutions that facilitate the allocation of capital. You get exchanges that create visible price signals.

Spain conducted trade in a top down method that focused income back into the top. It was focused on using hard currency from the Americas to trade for high value items in Manila. It wasn't creative about it and it closed a lot of people off from the trade by keeping it a monopoly controlled by the crown. This didn't encourage risk taking or innovation. The Dutch and the English had freer trade systems, the value of the trade was more distributed which created more people able to participate. More people experimented and you get new institutions, you get new methods of efficiency, and so on.

There's also a lot of political institutional differences, especially from English parliament, that prevented some of the more wasteful military adventurism that Spain suffered from.

Frank Fukayama's The Origins of Political Order actually does a good job of highlighting some of the key differences, especially from the standpoint of administration. Spain just didn't invest in administering their territories and didn't develop them b/c there was little reason to. The wealth that could be potentially made would be concentrated into a few chosen subjects of the Crown, the Crown, and the Church. It didn't make sense to take big risks. Read it with 1493 by Charles Mann if you can.