The average peasant may have been illiterate and convinced that his erections controlled the tides, but he knew enough to understand that toiling away in a Dark Satanic Mill sucked ass, so he avoided it. Luckily, the budding capitalist and landowning classes had a foolproof method for creating a motivated, agile workforce: enclosure. That’s where you go to a piece of land that had been used for common grazing and foraging for generations, throw a fence around it, and say, “This is mine now.” Deprived of their means of subsistence, peasants flocked to cities and filled factory floors, working
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