The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions

by Jason Hickel

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.30 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.

Wtf