🌊 Ripple · counterfactual
What if the enclosure of the commons had gone differently?
1750 · britain
Open fields are fenced into private farms, more output, and a landless workforce with nowhere to go but the towns.
If it had gone differently: The countryside keeps its smallholders and its common land; the cities have no waiting army of cheap labour.
What it made possible
Later turning points that leaned on the enclosure of the commons. Change it in the game and the ripples reach all of these.
- 1740Europe's population boom. Without it, Without a surplus of hands and mouths, there is no cheap urban workforce waiting for the factories.
- 1780The Industrial Revolution. Without it, Growth stays flat and Malthusian; most people alive in 1900 live about as their great-grandparents did.
- 1845The Great Irish Famine. Without it, The blight is contained; the Irish diaspora that will reshape Boston, New York and Chicago never forms.
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