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).
