The ECONOMIST: >Notice a close parallel with the industrial revolution. When rural peasants swapped their hovels for the textile mills of Lancashire, did it feel like an improvement? The Dickensian view is that factories replaced a rural idyll with urban misery, poverty, pollution and illness. Factories were indeed miserable and the urban poor were overworked and underfed. But they had flocked to take the jobs in factories often to get away from the cold, muddy, starving rural hell of their birth.<
This apologetic reading ignores the "enclosure movement" which re-interpreted traditional (or feudal) property rights in land entirely in favor of the rising and powerful class of land-owners. This proletarianized and pauperized the rural poor (who were not doing so well beforehand), eventually driving them to the city. It was not a choice on the part of the rural poor, except to the extent that one's response to "your money or your life" is a choice. This process of expropriation has been, and is being, repeated in many places around what used to be called the "third world." It's one of the things that's going on in Mexico these days. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
