[Excerpted with amendments from Chapter 2 of Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All]
We are often taught a story about modern history that feels reassuring: that the wealth and power of the West emerged through innovation, industriousness, and enlightened institutions; that development flowed outward from Europe and America to the rest of the world; that whatever injustices occurred were collateral damage that belong mostly to the past.
But that story leaves out too much.
The truth is that the global system we live in was not built simply through ingenuity. It was built through violent enclosure, dispossession, colonization, forced extraction, and the systematic transfer of wealth from the many to the few. And until we understand that history, it is almost impossible to understand why today’s world remains so extremely unequal—and why ecological devastation is woven so deeply into the foundations of our civilization.
Along with the physical devastation came something less visible but equally profound: the dissolution of the village itself.
It happened first in England, in the wake of the Black Death. With fewer peasants available to work the land for the aristocracy, ordinary people gained leverage they had never had. Wages doubled and tripled. Workers bargained for shorter hours.
The nobility’s response was to engineer scarcity. Using brute military force — and eventually Parliament itself — they systematically seized the commons: the collectively managed land that had given peasants their independence.
The millions of peasants who were forced off their land, losing their communities and means of subsistence, faced a grim reality. Starving, homeless, and bereft of any support system, they became refugees in their own country. Quantifying the magnitude of this catastrophe, economic historians estimate that wages declined by as much as seventy percent between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, while average life expectancy at birth fell from 43 years to the low 30s.⁶
New words such as “poverty,” “paupers,” and “vagabonds” became commonplace in the English language to describe the results of this cataclysm. But rather than responding compassionately, the authorities classified these new conditions of destitution as crimes requiring draconian punishments.
Along with the physical devastation came something less visible but equally profound: the dissolution of the village itself. Old-style peasant villages had made up for their meagerness in material wealth with a richly complex fabric of relationships, grounded in long-standing customs of mutual aid and cooperation. As these commons-based communities were dismantled, that social fabric unraveled. People were left unmoored, not only materially but spiritually, severed from the patterns of belonging that had sustained them. Prisons and mental hospitals—largely unnecessary in traditional rural communities—emerged in the late eighteenth century as holding pens for those whose lives had been fractured by these newly desperate conditions.⁷
The Birth of Artificial Scarcity
For the peasants who remained on the land, the old patronage relationship with the landlord gave way to a new system of market leases, granted only to those who proved most productive. In a process known as “improvement,” peasants were compelled to compete with one another to extract ever more from the land to satisfy the landlord and avoid eviction. As the anthropologist Jason Hickel observes, here we can see the early formation of capitalism: a system in which maximizing returns on capital investment became the governing imperative, eclipsing considerations of human welfare.⁸
Because of their desperation, industrialists could pay starvation wages while retaining maximal profit. And since the newly landless workers could no longer provide for their own food, clothing, and shelter, they became dependent on the market economy for virtually every aspect of their survival..
Artificial scarcity became the governing principle.
What the landlords and early industrialists had discovered was a principle that would prove endlessly replicable: artificial scarcity. The 18th-century agriculturalist Arthur Young stated it plainly — “everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.” Reverend Joseph Townsend agreed that hunger alone could “tame the fiercest animals” and teach “obedience and subjugation.” This was not fringe theorizing. It became the explicit foundation of social policy.
When European powers turned their attention to the rest of the world, they faced an identical problem. Indian peasants were satisfied with their lives. African villagers had no desire to descend into mines for someone else’s profit. Colonists in Africa agonized over what they literally called “the Labor Question”: how to compel contented people to work for them.
Artificial scarcity provided the answer — applied now with the added efficiency of military supremacy and the legitimizing machinery of imperial law. The British forced Indian peasants off their collectively managed land, replaced communal grain reserves with private property and rent obligations, and imposed taxes payable only in British currency. The result was that people who had been self-sufficient were suddenly desperate — and desperation, as Europe’s landlords had learned, is remarkably productive.
“Europe didn’t develop the colonies. The colonies developed Europe.” – Jason Hickel
The scale of what followed is difficult to comprehend. In the 16th century alone, close to 100 million Indigenous people in the Americas died through slaughter, starvation, or disease. Fifteen million Africans were transported into slavery. The silver extracted from South America between the 16th and 19th centuries, at historical rates of return, would be worth $165 trillion today — roughly a third of all private wealth on Earth. China and India, which together had accounted for two-thirds of the global economy, saw their combined share collapse to 10 percent as Europe’s tripled. As Jason Hickel memorably observed: “Europe didn’t develop the colonies. The colonies developed Europe.”
By the time colonialism reached its denouement, at the end of the Second World War, it had set in place the defining structures of the world we inhabit today. Western nations had amassed vast wealth and power at the expense of most of the world’s population, who were left impoverished and bereft of their ancestral cultural and economic traditions. After World War II, formal colonialism became politically untenable. But the underlying logic required no armies to continue — it only required control of the rules.
As US Cold War strategist George Kennan candidly noted in a 1948 internal memo, America possessed 50 percent of the world’s wealth with 6 percent of its population. “Our real task” he concluded, “is to devise a pattern of relations which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.”
The World Bank and IMF were structured specifically for this purpose, with voting rights allocated by financial ownership, and a US veto on all decisions. When newly independent nations attempted to chart their own course — nationalizing resources, redistributing land, building welfare systems — their leaders were overthrown. Iran. Guatemala. Chile. Indonesia. Ghana—the US participated in toppling seventy-one governments after World War II.
When military coups became too expensive and too visible, debt provided a cleaner instrument. After the oil shocks of the 1970s left developing nations desperate for loans, the IMF and World Bank became enforcers of “Structural Adjustment Programs”: in exchange for loans, countries were required to sell public assets, eliminate food subsidies, cut healthcare and education, and open their markets to foreign corporations. The result was the familiar logic of artificial scarcity, now administered by bankers in pinstriped suits rather than soldiers.
The result was not shared prosperity. It was a race to the bottom.
Today, transnational corporations and financial institutions shape the terms of life for billions of people, often with greater effective power than governments. Their overriding objective is simple: maximize returns to investors. Human wellbeing, ecological integrity, democracy, and community become secondary—if they are considered at all.
This is not a bug in the system. It is the system.
The Vanishing Act
What makes the modern iteration of this system so difficult to confront is that it has made itself invisible.
Today, the investment decisions that determine whether a community in Brazil loses its land or a city in Bangladesh can afford clean water are made by fund managers in New York and London acting on something called “fiduciary duty” — an obligation to maximize financial returns for shareholders. Those shareholders may well include your own pension fund. The chain of causality that connects enclosure in 14th-century England to a land grab in the Amazon today runs through structures so diffuse, so legally laundered, so genuinely intangible that even those operating within them can rarely see the whole.
Today, the consensus trance of global capitalism is not maintained by any single conspiracy. It is structural, self-reinforcing, and remarkably elegant. A small group of global power elites — no more than seven thousand people, predominantly white, 94 percent male, circulating among Davos, the Bilderberg Group, and the Council on Foreign Relations — own or influence the media channels through which most people encounter the world. The result is what Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman called the manufacture of consent. Even without overt editorial pressure, journalists internalize the filters their outlets require and convince themselves they are providing objective coverage.
The most consequential effect of this trance is that it places the deep structure of the system itself beyond the horizon of serious discussion. The sacred precepts — grow the economy, increase shareholder returns, trust the market — function exactly like religious dogma, enforced by a priesthood of economists, politicians, and analysts as intolerant of heresy as any inquisition.
That is why any serious vision of an ecocivilization must begin with history—not as an academic exercise, but as moral and political reckoning. If we want a future grounded in regeneration, justice, and shared flourishing, we have to understand the structures that produced our present. We have to see that today’s inequality, ecological breakdown, and corporate dominance are not accidental. They are all expressions of a civilizational pattern centuries in the making.
Once we understand this, we are no longer confined by the myths that uphold business as usual. We can begin to ask a different question: not how to patch a system built on extraction, but how to build one organized instead around life.
Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All
Melville House: available May 26, 2026
PREORDER: Bookshop.org | Amazon US | Amazon UK
Comments (2)
Yes, yes it is so very important that people know about the Enclosures in order to understand the world today. As John Mohawk once said “The problem of the modern world began 500 years ago” referring to Enclosures. The work of political economist Henry George in Progress and Poverty showed how to reclaim the commons and free labor with an elegant and practical public finance policy that shifts the tax burden off of labor and what people produce and onto the nature and society created land value, which is thus a clear path to reclaiming the commons. His work was sidelined by the usual greedy players but it is coming to the surface once again as a perennial wisdom teaching. You are welcome to join our international movement at theIU.org – the international Union for Land Value Taxation where you can sign up for a free newsletter. Thank you Kosmos for publishing this important essay!!!
Thank you Jeremy for a deeply-researched and thought-provoking analysis of how we humans have come to our current circumstances. You have captured the essence of what Gerhard Lenski wrote in his 1960s book, Power and Privilege, as well as what Henry George tried to warn us about in the late 19th century. George observed that we “seek to satisfy our desires with the least exertion” and, therefore, have a strong tendency to attempt to monopolize nature. The story of mass poverty, continuing for generations, is the story of the private appropriate of economic rents — of land, of other natural assets (e.g., frequencies on the broadcast spectrum) with an inelastic supply. The low, effective rate of taxation of economic rents is a consistent characteristic of societies dominated by rentier privilege. Adam Smith, to no avail, tried to warn his fellow Brits of this outcome. A.R. Jacques Turgot (a Physiocrat) did likewise in France and lost his position as finance minister for arguing that both the Church and the aristocracy should pay taxes equal to the potential annual rental value of whatever land they held. Central to systemic reform, I came to believe decades ago, is the adoption of Henry George’s system of public revenue, the reliance on economic rents from all sources and the elimination of taxation on income earned producing goods and providing services, the elimination of taxation of actual tangible capital goods, and the elimination of taxation on commerce. Economists who have embraced Henry George’s approach see these changes as the path to non-inflationary full employment, accompanied by sustainability in the exploitation of land and natural resources. We get a glimpse of the possibilities in the small number of communities that have adopted a two-rate form of real estate tax, where the rate imposed on the assessed value of land is some multiple of the rate imposed on the value of buildings.
One economist, Fred Foldvary, estimated that economic rent equaled as much as one-third of U.S. Gross Domestic Product. This is wealth that rightfully belongs to society but is left in private hands. The result is the worsening concentration of income and wealth that people everywhere experience, with a few exceptions (e.g., Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore do the best job of publicly capturing the economic rent of land).