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

by Jason Hickel

In 1585, English colonisers made their first attempt at reproducing the new system of enclosure and ‘improvement’ in a foreign territory. They forcibly expropriated the land of Irish peasants and resettled it with farmers trained in the methods of agricultural intensification, directly replicating what was already under way back at home. As in England, this process impoverished vast numbers of people, who were forced to retreat on to small plots of marginal land. Many were left with no hope of survival and migrated to England and Scotland to work as wage labourers – something that had never been necessary before. By the early 1800s, once the enclosure movement had run its violent course over two to three centuries, Irish peasants had so little land for their own use that they were planting only potatoes – the one crop that would yield sufficient calories for them to survive on very small plots. This dependency on potatoes proved deadly when the potato blight hit in 1845. Over the next seven years 1 million people died – more than 10 per cent of the Irish population – in what became known as the Great Famine.

Fuckrn rich people