These laws unleashed an extraordinary outpouring of state violence against the dispossessed. In England, as many as 72,000 ‘idle persons’ were hanged during the reign of Henry VIII, according to one account. In the 1570s, up to 400 ‘rogues’ were executed each year.39 The goal was to fundamentally change people’s beliefs about labour. Elites had to literally whip people into becoming docile, obedient, productive workers.
