A review of The Enclosure of Knowledge: Books, Power and Agrarian Capitalism in Britain 1660-1800, James D Fisher (Cambridge University Press, 2022), £75 From the 16th until the 19th century, the multifaceted process known as enclosure transformed England’s rural landscape.… Continue Reading
“Be sure to send me the equivalent of my cloth in silver so that I can buy barley.” A woman in Assur to her husband in a distant trading colony, about 1900 BCE. “You are perpetually pressing oil, grinding barley,… Continue Reading
What means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of the productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for… Continue Reading
A review of Richard J Evans, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (Little, Brown, 2019), £35 Breadth and verve made Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) the most sold and most translated of socialist historians ever to write in English. Compared with his… Continue Reading
A review of Martin Empson, Kill all the Gentlemen: Class Struggle and Change in the English Countryside (Bookmarks, 2018), £14.99 When Karl Marx analysed the birth of capitalism he drew attention to what he called the primitive accumulation of capital.… Continue Reading