by Jason Hickel
When we think of medieval peasants we usually assume that they must have lived rather miserable lives. And this is true, in many ways: disease was common, nutritional standards were not very high and life expectancy was short – as it was for most people living in settled agricultural societies before the late 19th century. But peasants did have the most important thing they needed to guarantee a stable livelihood: they had secure access to land, which they could use for farming crops, grazing livestock, hunting game, drawing water, excavating peat and cutting wood for heating, cooking and shelter. Some had direct rights to their own land, others had the right to use lands owned by lords, and others had access to shared ‘commons’. Peasants may not have been rich, but they enjoyed the basic right of habitation – a right that was protected by long-standing tradition and strong laws, such as the 1217 Charter of the Forest in England. It was unthinkable that anyone should not have secure access to the basic resources they needed for survival.
But this traditional security system came under attack in the 15th century – a process that started in England. Wealthy nobles, eager to profit from the highly lucrative wool trade, began a systematic campaign to turn their land into sheep pasture. To do this, they dissolved old feudal obligations and abolished the right of habitation that had protected peasants for so many centuries. They also began to privatise the common land that people relied on for survival, denying them rights of access and fencing the land off for their own commercial use. The ‘enclosure’ movement, as it came to be known, saw the privatisation of tens of millions of acres over the course of two or three centuries, the displacement of much of the country’s population, and the clearance of hundreds of villages. Enclosure was not a peaceful process – it was profoundly violent, as dispossession always is. It required a considerable degree of force – burning villages, destroying houses, razing crops – to prise millions of people off their ancestral lands.
While the wool industry was a major driver of enclosure, the Reformation added impetus to the process. When Henry VIII dissolved the old Catholic monasteries, Church lands were quickly appropriated by the elite. Many of the peasants who lived on them were kicked off. But by far the most powerful driver of enclosure had to do with agriculture. Landlords began to realise that they could skim much more value from peasants if they were able to get them to increase their agricultural output. To do this, they transformed peasants’ secure tenure rights into a market for leases, and gave leases only to those who were able to produce the most. Those who were less productive would be kicked off the land and left with no way to survive. This new system – known at the time as ‘improvement’ – put peasants under tremendous pressure. If they wanted to survive they had to devise ways of extracting ever more yield from their land – far beyond what they needed to live on. They had to increase their workload and intensify their farming techniques. This led to a dramatic increase in agricultural output, but the only real improvement was to the landlords’ profits.
The application of this market logic to land and farming marked the formal birth of capitalism. It meant that, for the first time in history, people’s lives were effectively governed by the imperatives to intensify productivity and maximise profit. But still, this early form of agrarian capitalism didn’t look quite like the form of capitalism we have today. There was another crucial step.
As the enclosure movement advanced across England, peasant riots became widespread. There was Jack Cade’s rebellion in 1450, for example, and Robert Kett’s rebellion of 1549, both of which had the issue of land rights at their core. In 1607, rebellions erupted across Northamptonshire and quickly spread to Warwickshire and Leicestershire. Thousands of protestors pulled down fences and other barriers that had been erected around enclosed land. The Midland Revolt, as historians call it, culminated in an insurrection at Newton, where peasants ended up in armed combat with the enclosers. They lost. Fifty people were killed, and the movement’s leaders were publicly hung and quartered.
Worried that riots like this might coalesce into revolution, the monarchy eventually stepped in to curtail the growing powers of the landlords, defending peasants’ traditional rights to common lands. But its efforts were defeated after the English Civil War in the 1640s, which limited the powers of the Crown and allowed the landlord class – which came to control Parliament – to more or less do what they wanted. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 didn’t help matters as it only further empowered the landed classes to shape state policy in their own interests. As a result, Parliament itself became a powerful instrument of enclosure, designing legislation that formally extinguished peasants’ rights to the commons and enabled ‘the clearing of the estates’ – a national programme designed to ‘sweep’ human beings off the elite’s newly privatised landholdings. Between 1760 and 1870, some 7 million acres were enclosed by acts of Parliament – about one-sixth of England.
This final episode in the destruction of the English peasant system exactly coincided with the Industrial Revolution. By the middle of the 19th century it was complete: there was almost no common land left and millions of people had been forcibly displaced. The result was a massive refugee crisis, unlike anything we can imagine today – bleaker than our most dystopian science fiction films. Huge portions of England’s population had nowhere to go. They had no homes, no land, no food. It was a humanitarian catastrophe: for the first time in history, a significant proportion of the population had no access to any form of livelihood for survival. By the middle of the 1600s, the word ‘poverty’ had come into common use to describe this new condition, and during the late 18th and early 19th centuries the term became entrenched as a major concept in English-language discourse. This helps us make sense of the extremely low life expectancy found among England’s working class in the early 19th century.
The displaced peasants had no way to feed themselves, save for one last option: to sell their labour for wages. Such people were euphemistically referred to as ‘free labourers’, but this term is quite misleading. True, they were not technically slaves, but wage work was hardly a matter of free choice. Some of the displaced ended up working on the new sheep runs or on the capitalist farms. But most of them moved into towns, pouring into cities like London to scratch out a meagre living. The population of England’s urban centres grew at an unprecedented rate and outpaced the urban populations of the rest of Europe, where the enclosure movement had not yet gained traction. These growing cities were not pleasant places to live: the majority of people had no choice but to live in slums, and working conditions were horrible – the hellish backdrop to Dickens’ works such as Oliver Twist.
This troubled episode in England’s history had a silver lining, at least for the country’s elite. The impoverished refugees provided the cheap labour necessary to fuel the Industrial Revolution, since they had no choice but to accept the slavery-like conditions and rock-bottom wages of factory work. Factories sprang up to provide inexpensive, mass-produced goods to meet growing consumer demand, using the cheap labour of those who had been displaced. Even small children were sent to Blake’s ‘dark Satanic Mills’ by families desperate to survive. Because employment was relatively scarce, competition among workers drove down the cost of labour, destroying the guild system that had previously protected the livelihoods of craftsmen. Desperate to keep their jobs, workers were under heavy pressure to produce as much as possible and regularly worked for sixteen hours a day – much more than peasants would have spent working on their farms before enclosure. And most of the enormous wealth they produced was appropriated by the factory owners, who gave very little back in wages. This system created a ‘trickle-up’ effect on a scale that far outstripped what even the most rapacious feudal lord enjoyed. England’s industrialists were able to amass wealth unimaginable to even the richest of kings.
The emergence of the landless working class added a final piece to the great transformation of England’s economy: they became the world’s first mass consumer population, for they depe
nded on markets for even the most basic goods necessary for survival: clothes, food, housing, and so on. It was these three forces – enclosure, mass displacement of peasants and the creation of a consumer market – that provided the internal conditions for the Industrial Revolution. The external conditions, as we have seen, had to do with the colonisation of the Americas and the slave trade.
It is important to grasp the difference between this emerging capitalist system and the various systems that preceded it. Previously, monarchs, conquistadors and feudal landlords directly appropriated wealth from others either by stealing it from them or by forcing them to pay tribute. In other words, they relied on some kind of direct coercive force. But under the new system such direct coercion was no longer necessary. The elite simply relied on the fact that the competitive pressures of the labour market (and the market in leases) would increase workers’ productivity at a much higher rate than the one at which their wages increased. This was the basic mechanism of profit, and it served as an automatic conveyor belt for redistributing wealth upwards.
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We tend to assume that the emergence of capitalism was a natural and inevitable process – as though its basic logic has always existed in human society and gradually matured into the Industrial Revolution. But the historical evidence suggests a very different story. The emergence of capitalism required violence and mass impoverishment, both at home and abroad – a process that left vast swathes of people dispossessed (in the case of English peasants) or enslaved (in the case of Africans and indigenous Americans). Even in England, people didn’t welcome this new system with open arms. On the contrary, they protested and rebelled against it, for it violated long-standing cultural expectations about people’s basic rights to habitation, to the means of subsistence, to the means of life. The goal of the enclosure movement was not just to displace people from their land, but – much more profoundly – to eradicate these cultural expectations.
Why is this history of England useful to our understanding of global poverty? Because the process of enclosure not only marks the origin of mass poverty as a historical phenomenon, it also illustrates the basic logic of the process that would produce poverty across the rest of the world.
Imperialism’s New Logic
The rise of capitalism changed not only the shape of Europe, but also its approach to imperialism. Originally, imperialism had been organised around direct, coercive appropriation of wealth. In some cases – as with the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas – it focused on stealing precious metals such as gold and silver or on the use of slavery on plantations and in mines. In other cases its goal was securing access to trade routes, as with the French in Canada and the Dutch in South Africa. In all cases, the basic idea was to gain access to existing sources and flows of wealth. But when England got involved in the imperial project, the logic of imperialism changed. And it started in Ireland.
In 1585, English colonisers made their first attempt at reproducing the new system of enclosure and ‘improvement’ in a foreign territory. They forcibly expropriated the land of Irish peasants and resettled it with farmers trained in the methods of agricultural intensification, directly replicating what was already under way back at home. As in England, this process impoverished vast numbers of people, who were forced to retreat on to small plots of marginal land. Many were left with no hope of survival and migrated to England and Scotland to work as wage labourers – something that had never been necessary before. By the early 1800s, once the enclosure movement had run its violent course over two to three centuries, Irish peasants had so little land for their own use that they were planting only potatoes – the one crop that would yield sufficient calories for them to survive on very small plots.
This dependency on potatoes proved deadly when the potato blight hit in 1845. Over the next seven years 1 million people died – more than 10 per cent of the Irish population – in what became known as the Great Famine. What made this famine so appalling was that it was completely avoidable; it would never have happened if peasants had retained full rights to their ancestral land, where they would have had plenty of space to produce a diversity of crops. In other words, the scarcity that led to the famine was artificially created. But even with the new agrarian system in place, Ireland was still producing plenty of food, in aggregate; the problem was that it was all being siphoned away by the British. Ireland was exporting thirty to fifty shiploads of food to England and Scotland each day during the famine, while the local population starved to death.
Ireland may have been the first experiment in replicating English capitalism through imperialism, but it wasn’t the last. This same model was reproduced by English colonisers in the Americas, even using some of the same people who had helped out with the Ireland experiment. How did the English manage to justify the mass dispossession that ‘improvement’ entailed? For this we largely have the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke to thank. In the late 1600s, Locke – a large landowner in England with stakes in American colonisation – wrote the Second Treatise of Government, which developed a new and very powerful theory of property ownership. He stated that while land initially belongs to all people in common, once you ‘mix’ your labour with it then it becomes your private property. This ‘labour theory of property’ was used to justify the theft of land in the Americas: since it appeared that no one was engaged in agricultural production, settlers could rightfully appropriate the land as long as they were willing to farm it.
But of course in many cases there were people farming the land that English colonisers wanted to take, just as in Ireland. In such cases, Locke claimed that what really counted for ownership was not simply the act of farming, but the improvement (i.e. intensification and profit-orientation) of the farming techniques. So settlers who were prepared to apply the principles of English-style agrarian capitalism were justified in appropriating the lands of others. According to Locke, this added to the common good because it would increase overall productivity, even if it meant displacing the land’s original inhabitants: it was a contribution to the betterment of humanity, bringing people from the Dark Ages into the light of capitalist civilisation. In other words, once again the idea of improvement came to trump the basic value of human habitation. Indeed, improvement began to assume the status of a religious creed, and its economic principles took on a kind of moral meaning.
But the consequences of this new imperialism were devastating, in the rest of the world even more than in Ireland. In America, the English who settled the north-east in the 1600s were quick to expropriate land from the indigenous population. The governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, acknowledged that Indians lived there but argued that because they had not ‘subdued’ the land they had no right to it. These land grabs took the English into outright warfare with the indigenous people and culminated in dozens of bloody massacres. In the 1800s, the young United States systematised this land grab by forcibly dispossessing native inhabitants, beginning with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. At the time there were some 120,000 Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River. By 1944, only 30,000 remained; many had been killed, but most had been forced by the US government to move westward. Some 15,000 people perished along the way, on the Trail of Tears. This process of mass enclosure opened up more than 25 million acres for white settlement, clearing the way for tobacco and cotton plantations in the South and intensive grain-farming techniques further north.
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What unites the Irish and American cases is that both were propelled by the logic of enclosure and improvement. But there is a third example of this that is worth visiting: India. There, the process of enclosure and improvement in the late 19th century led to human suffering on a scale that outstripped that visited on both the Irish and indigenous North Americans, if such tragedies can be compared. It is a story that truly boggles the mind, although it is very little known.
The colonisation of India began in the early 1600s as a corporate affair. It was led by
the East India Company, which focused on securing control over trading routes east of the Cape of Good Hope. But the Company’s mandate gradually expanded, and by the 1800s it had established direct administrative power over most of the subcontinent, which it eventually handed over to the British government. Wielding this power, the main intervention that the British made in India was to reorganise the farming system, once again according to the logic of improvement.
Unlike in America, in most cases the British didn’t resettle the land themselves, but rather forced the Indians to adopt a new agricultural system. Indian farmers were made to cultivate crops for the export market – opium, indigo, cotton, wheat and rice – instead of for subsistence. For many people, making this shift was the only way to survive: it was necessary simply in order to pay the crushing taxes – and debts – that the British had imposed. To further encourage this transformation, the British compelled villages to sell off their grain reserves and did away with systems of mutual support and reciprocity that people had long relied on. They also enclosed common lands at a dizzying pace. Prior to 1870, India’s forests had been communally managed; farmers used them to acquire firewood for cooking and heating, and for fodder to feed the cattle they used for ploughing and fertiliser. By the end of the decade the forests had been almost completely enclosed, to be used by the British for building ships and railways. And it wasn’t only forests that the British enclosed: common water rights were also privatised and auctioned off with enclosed land, rendered a market commodity for the first time.
Under the British, these centuries-old traditional welfare buffers were destroyed on the basis that they ‘interfered’ with market forces. The idea was that by stripping them away you could compel Indian farmers to be more productive: cast at the mercy of the market, they would figure out ways to extract ever higher yields from the land. Yet farmers found that the market was rigged against them, for India’s tariffs were controlled in London and in the interests of British stockholders. Many smaller Indian farmers were quickly overcome by competition, and their lands appropriated by bigger and more powerful businesses.