Is the world a vile conspiracy of the powerful against the powerless? Or are the powerful just blundering around from one crisis to another?
Take the English Enclosure Movement that was part of a centuries long readjustment of land ownership and rights.
The Narrative is that landowners wanted to appropriate “common land” used by peasants for pasturing their animals and convert the land to more profitable use. And this impoverished the peasants and provoked them to protest. One thing led to another and eventually the peasants of England’s green and pleasant land all became workers in crammed into dark satanic mills in smokey industrial cities dying of respiratory diseases.
But then I have been reading about kids being transported in 1800 from workhouses north of London — where the poor were stacked in the pre-industrial era — to the new spinning mills where they were cruelly exploited and worked from morning till night. They were worse off working at the mill than in the workhouse. Wat? I thought that the workhouse was the worst thing ever.
I mean, couldn’t they get adults to work in those dark satanic mills? No. You needed to get pre-adults to work in the factories. Factory owners discovered that adults would not adjust to the factory discipline and culture. So, Hmm. Is that what our gubmint compulsory schooling is all about? Making delta-minus morons out of our kids so that they will work in mind-killing jobs?
Here’s another curious fact. According to John Waller in The Real Oliver Twist, a lot of the kids at the workhouse were not helpless orphans, but put there by their parents because they couldn’t afford to feed them, they said.
Fact is that history is a lot more complicated than the narrative. Here’s how La Wik tells it.
First with William the Conqueror in 1066 there was a general upswing in prosperity, but in the 13th century the lords did well but the peasants did not. Then in the 14th century the Black Death killed off maybe half the population and the landowners tried to stop the peasants moving around in an effort to stop increases in wages caused by the smaller labor force. In the 16th century there was money to be made in wool from sheep, and so the landowners kicked the peasants off the land in favor of grazing land. But then in the 17th century came the British Agricultural Revolution with increased crop yields and population.
And then in 1800ish came the Industrial Revolution, and little kiddies being sent from the work’us to the factory.
Of course, when anything goes wrong, and the people suffer, because of a failed harvest or because of some new technology, a lot of people lose their livelihood. And they blame the system. And lefty historians rush to prove that it was all because of greed and exploitation. But I am inclined to go along with British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan who attributed everything to “Events, dear boy, Events.”