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
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