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 depended 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.
Shortest summary of capitalism
