Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

the rise of capitalism in Europe – and Europe’s Industrial Revolution – did not emerge ex nihilo. It hinged on commodities that were produced by enslaved workers, on lands stolen from colonised peoples, and processed in factories staffed by European peasants who had been forcibly dispossessed by enclosure. We tend to think of these as separate processes, but they were all part of the same project, and operated with the same underlying logic. Enclosure was a process of internal colonisation, and colonisation was a process of enclosure. Europe’s peasants were dispossessed from their lands just as Indigenous Americans were (although, notably, the latter were treated much worse, excluded from the realm of rights, and even humanity, altogether). And the slave trade is nothing if not the enclosure and colonisation of bodies – bodies that were appropriated for the sake of surplus accumulation just as land was, and treated as property in the same way.