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“A Multiplication of Wretchedness” in England, 1750–1850
From: Tiny Engines of Abundance
$2.10
Chapter 2 examines England and Wales from the late 1700s and early 1800s, in the midst of what has often been called an agriculture revolution. This chapter argues that appreciation for the productivity of very small scale “peasant” producers would have alleviated a century of distress in rural England and Wales. Important among the causes of increased poverty was the determination by landowners, farmers and the purveyors of “political economy” — newly masquerading as a science — to make the rural poor entirely dependent on wages. The chapter discusses topics including Thomas Robert Malthus and Malthusian, tenant farming, land enclosures, the Poor Law Commissions 1832-34, and the general peasants’ experience during this period.
