My point was that the reason the steam engine changed the world, rather than ending up a showpiece in some ruler’s landscaped garden, was the epic raid on the common lands that had preceded its invention: the enclosures. The singularity we now call the Great Transformation – the name given by the great theorist Karl Polyani to the birth of the market society over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – involved precisely this sequence: first the plunder of the common lands, made possible by brute state violence, and only then Watt’s splendid technological breakthrough.
