How Did People Survive Before Capitalism?

Before Wages

In 1516, an English lawyer and humanist named Thomas More published Utopia. In it, a character describes what was happening to the English countryside:

“Your sheep, that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, have become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities.”

He wasn't writing fantasy. He was describing enclosure. Landowners were fencing off the common fields to graze sheep for the wool trade. And in doing so, they were destroying the way most people survived.

For centuries before this, survival in England — and across most of Europe — didn't require an employer. It required access to land. And most people had it.

What the Commons Actually Was

The commons wasn't empty land that nobody owned. It was land that communities owned together, and it came with specific use rights that were carefully defined and protected:

Common of pasture — the right to graze a certain number of animals on shared meadows. Every household knew how many animals they could put on the commons, and the community enforced the limits so the land wasn't exhausted.

Common of estovers — the right to gather wood from common forests for fuel and building. Not unlimited — you couldn't clear-cut it — but enough to heat your home.

Common of piscary — fishing rights in shared streams and ponds.

Gleaning rights — after a harvest, the poor could enter the fields and collect what the harvesters had left behind. This appears in the Bible (Ruth gleaning in Boaz's fields) and was common across Europe for thousands of years.

Common arable strips — in the open-field system, a village's farmland was divided into strips. Individual families farmed specific strips but the system was collective — decisions about crop rotation and fallow were made communally.

Put it together and you have: food, fuel, building materials, and a safety net. Not paradise. Life was hard, disease was common, harvests failed, feudal lords extracted labor and rent. But survival didn't depend on finding an employer. It depended on access to common resources. That access was real, legal, and protected by custom going back centuries.

The Enclosure Acts: 5,000 Laws to Take It Away

Between roughly 1604 and 1914, the British Parliament passed around 5,000 Enclosure Acts. Each one took a specific piece of common land and divided it among private landowners. Each one was passed by Parliament.

Parliament, at this time, was controlled by landowners. Only men with significant property could vote. The people who stood to gain from enclosure were the people who voted for enclosure. The people who lost their common rights — the cottagers, the smallholders, the women who depended on gleaning — had no vote. They weren't consulted. They weren't compensated.

They became trespassers on land their families had used for generations.

The General Enclosure Act of 1801 and the Enclosure Act of 1845 streamlined the process — instead of needing a separate act for every field, there were now standard procedures. It made enclosure faster and cheaper for landowners to implement.

Between 1760 and 1820 alone, around 6 million acres of common land were enclosed in England. To give you a sense of scale: that's roughly the size of Belgium.

The people displaced didn't disappear. They went to the cities. They went to the new factories. They went down the coal mines. They had no other option, because the alternatives had been legislated out of existence.

The Industrial Revolution didn't just happen because clever people invented machines. It happened because millions of people had been stripped of any way to survive that didn't involve selling their labor. The factories had a labor supply because Parliament had created it — by destroying the commons.

This is the same mechanism colonial hut taxes created in Africa. Different method, same logic: destroy the alternatives, manufacture dependency on wages.

The Invention of Unemployment

Here is a strange fact: the word “unemployment” did not exist in common English usage before the 1890s.

This isn't because people used a different word for it. It's because the concept didn't exist. There was famine, there was poverty, there was disaster. But the specific situation of a physically able person who wants to work and cannot find anyone willing to pay them — that's only possible in a wage-labor economy.

Before enclosure, if you weren't working for an employer, you were just... living. Growing food, grazing animals, gathering wood, fishing. You might be poor by any reasonable standard. But you weren't unemployed, because “employment” — selling your labor to someone else in exchange for a wage — wasn't the only way to survive.

Unemployment was invented the moment the commons was enclosed. When you can only survive by finding an employer, and no employer wants you, you have invented a new kind of poverty: poverty not from natural disaster, but from the absence of a buyer for your labor.

The Alternative to Wages: The Workhouse

The displaced poor didn't just quietly accept their new condition. The English Poor Laws evolved over centuries to manage the problem of poverty that enclosure created. By the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, the solution was the workhouse.

The workhouse was deliberately designed to be worse than the worst available wage job. The designers were explicit about this. The principle was called “less eligibility”: conditions in the workhouse should be less eligible (worse) than the condition of the lowest independent laborer. The logic: if the workhouse was better than a bad job, workers would prefer the workhouse. So make the workhouse hellish.

Inside workhouses: families were separated (men, women, and children housed in different wards and forbidden from seeing each other). Meals were minimal and deliberately monotonous. Work was pointless — oakum picking (unpicking old rope until your fingers bled), stone breaking, bone crushing. The diet was designed to keep you alive but not healthy.

Charles Dickens, who visited workhouses, wrote Oliver Twist in response. The famous scene where Oliver asks for more gruel wasn't creative exaggeration. It was reportage.

The system worked as designed. Workers who might have refused terrible wages accepted them rather than face the workhouse. The choice between bad wages and something worse than bad wages isn't a free market in labor. It's coercion with extra steps.

Fictitious Commodities

Three things that markets treat as commodities were never actually produced for sale.

Labor — human beings and their time. It can be sold on the market. But it was never produced to be sold. People are born. They grow up. Their time is their life. When you buy labor, you're buying a piece of someone's existence.

Land — nature. It wasn't manufactured. It wasn't produced. The value of a piece of land is mostly created by the community around it — the roads, the schools, the infrastructure. Treating it as a commodity and allowing its full price to be captured by a private owner means privatizing value that society created.

Money — a social institution, a medium of exchange. When you treat it as a commodity to be produced for profit (through interest on debt), you get the bank-created money system we covered — where new money goes primarily to those who already have collateral.

The market economy didn't discover that labor is a commodity. It decided to treat it as one. And then built legal, physical, and social structures to enforce that fiction — from enclosure acts to workhouses to vagrancy laws that criminalized being poor without employment. (Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944)

Treating labor as a commodity means that when there's no demand for your labor, you starve. No natural system produces this outcome. It requires active construction. The enclosure acts were that construction.

What Enclosure Did to Women

The standard history of enclosure focuses on men losing their farming rights. Enclosure hit women differently — and more completely.

In pre-enclosure England, women participated actively in the common economy. They grazed animals on the commons, they gleaned, they processed wool, they brewed ale, they sold produce in markets. These were real economic activities with real economic independence. Women could own property in their own names in some contexts. Widows often managed farms.

Enclosure took most of these activities off the table. The commons that women had worked was privatized. The cottage industries that women had run were undercut by factory production. The markets where women had sold goods shrank.

What remained? Domestic labor. Cooking, cleaning, childcare, nursing — all the work required to maintain the household and reproduce the labor force for the next generation.

But this labor was not paid. It was not recognized as economic. It was reclassified as “natural” — something women did out of love, out of duty, out of their nature as wives and mothers. This wasn't a natural development. It was the enclosure of women's labor — making it invisible and unpaid so that the factory owners got an enormous subsidy. The workers in the factories had to be fed, clothed, and cared for. The cost of that reproduction was transferred to women and called “love.”

The housewife — as a specific social role, economically dependent on a husband's wage — was built by the same enclosure that built the factory system. It required enclosing women out of the independent economy. (Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 2004)

The 8-Hour Day Was Fought For, Not Given

Into the late nineteenth century, the working day in industrial England and the United States was routinely ten to twelve hours. Six days a week. Children worked in factories. There were no weekends, no holidays, no sick pay, no retirement.

The eight-hour day movement began in the 1860s. The slogan was simple: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.” The people who invented the weekend were recognizing, for the first time, that workers had a right to time that belonged to them.

The Haymarket affair in Chicago in 1886 — a general strike for the eight-hour day that ended in a bomb explosion and the hanging of labor organizers — is still commemorated globally as International Workers' Day (May 1st). The people who died for it didn't get to see it implemented. But later workers did.

Henry Ford standardized the eight-hour day in his factories in 1914. His reason was unsentimental: he found that workers on ten-hour days made more mistakes and were less productive than workers on eight hours. The humane reform also happened to maximize profit. But it had taken decades of strikes and organizing pressure to get the point where an employer would discover that.

The 40-hour work week became federal law in the United States under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 — a hundred years after the first Enclosure Act peaked, and after sustained union organizing and strikes across multiple countries.

Nothing about the working day was natural. Its length, its existence, its conditions — all were contested, fought over, and determined by the relative power of workers versus employers. When workers had more power (through unions, through political organization), conditions improved. When employers had more power (through legal suppression of unions, through the threat of the workhouse), conditions worsened.

The weekend you have — if you have one — is a historical achievement, not a natural right. It can be taken away. In many parts of the world, it already has been.

The Same Playbook, Applied Globally

English enclosure is the most documented example, but the mechanism was replicated across every territory European empires colonized.

In India, the British Permanent Settlement of 1793 transformed the Bengali peasantry's complex relationship with land into something simple and legible: private property owned by zamindars (landlords) who could sell it, mortgage it, and evict from it. Village commons, forest rights, and customary use rights were abolished in the name of rationalization. The result was the same as England: people who had survived through common access now needed to earn cash to pay rent.

In Africa, the colonial land seizures didn't just take territory — they took the basis of subsistence. In Kenya, the Crown Lands Ordinance of 1915 declared all “waste and unoccupied” land to be Crown property — where “unoccupied” meant not occupied according to British legal concepts of individual private ownership. Communally used land was declared empty. Then it was sold to settlers. Kikuyu farmers who had farmed the same land for generations became squatters.

Then, as we covered in the tax article, came the hut tax: a tax that could only be paid in colonial currency, that could only be earned by working for wages, that effectively converted subsistence farmers into wage laborers. The tax and the land seizure worked together. Take the land, then demand cash. There was only one way to get cash.

The pattern is identical in every case: identify what gives people independence, remove it, replace it with dependency on wages, then set the wage terms. The commons, the forest, the traditional farmland — wherever there was a source of independent survival, it was enclosed.

And wherever it was enclosed, the people doing the enclosing got richer. Specifically because they were enclosing.

Common Questions