the profits of the earth do not belong to the landlords --1/13/26

13 Jan 2026

the profits of the earth do not belong to the landlords --1/13/26

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Today's selection-- from Capitalism by Sven Beckert. Human beings did not adapt easily or well to the introduction of the factory and the regularization and restrictions of labour and work:

“As wave after wave of commodification and dispossession crashed over large swaths of the world's countryside, societies were remade on a massive scale, changing how millions lived and subsisted. Capitalists reimagined the ecology of large areas and connected distant societies, The world that they built over two centuries was fundamentally different from any that had shaped human affairs before. This was the moment the familiar framework of the global capitalist economy emerged.

“Unsurprisingly, the revolutionary agenda that was shaking up the countryside encountered opposition—from both the top of social hierarchies and the bottom. Many rulers still preferred keeping capitalists at bay, even as they increasingly depended on them, and producers everywhere preferred the commons and subsistence farming. Resistance was powerful in areas where older social and political structures were resilient, including much of the European countryside, the west coast of Africa, almost all of Asia, and indeed much of the world. Global capitalism was neither a natural state of things nor a straightforward undertaking—the restructuring of ever more parts of the world and of social life along a capitalist logic was, in fact, exceedingly difficult and took centuries to unfold. It took even longer to reach a state in which this peculiar way of organizing economic life seemed ‘natural.’

“This is why the first significant commercialization of the countryside unfolded on islands—some metaphorical, some real—areas where social and political opposition were least pronounced, areas that were either unpopulated (such as Barbados), occupied by nomadic people who had little ability to resist, as in the Bajio, or where social structures were severely weakened (as in feudal Europe). But even in these places, people resisted dispossession, proletarianization, enslavement, and the commodification of their lives.

“The world in which capital owners increasingly ignored the preferences of peasants and tributary rulers was a scene of global social struggle: Capitalism resembled a state of war. As with most revolutions, it rested on an enormous degree of coercion, and even when it succeeded, its offspring, a rapidly growing group of propertyless workers—some enslaved, some indentured, others enserfed or hired for wages—frightened those who drew on their labor. The countryside became the site of struggles, with peasants, indentured servants, feudal elites, wageworkers, and slaves resisting the revolutionizing agenda of early capitalists.

“This was true everywhere. Ottoman rural cultivators, for example, threatened with losing control over land as urban capital gained power, sometimes resorted to court battles, but at other times took up arms or turned to banditry to assert their claims and rights.British rural cultivators revolted against enclosures for three centuries. Already in 1548, in an expostulatory tract titled An Infarmacion and Peticion Agaynst the Oppressours of the Pore Commons of This Realme, Robert Crowley had warned land reformers about the consequences of dispossessing farmers of their lands:

“If the impotent creatures perish for lacke of necessaries, you are the murderers, for you have theyr enheritaunce and do minister unto them. If the sturdy fall to stealeyng, robbyng, & reueynge, then you are the causers thereof, for you dygge in, enclose, and wytholde from the earth out of the whych they should dygge and plowe theyr lyueynge

“A spate of rebellions ripped across the English countryside. In 1549, peasants destroyed hedges and fences in what is remembered as Kett's Rebellion. Its leader, Robert Kett, demanded "that no lord of no mannor shall comon uppon the Comons. His movement was suppressed, and he was hanged for treason. Half a century later, in 1607, the Midland Revolt (culminating in the Newton Rebellion) announced, ‘Wee, as members of the whole, doe feele the smarte of these incroaching Tirants, which would grind our flesh upon the whetstone of poverty, and make our loyall hearts to faint with breathing, so that they may dwell by themselves in the midst of theyr heards of fatt weathers.’ Their rebellion was as forcefully repressed as similar revolts in Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Bedfordshire, Derbyshire, and Worcestershire.

Robert Kett and his followers on Mousehold Heath (from Kett's Rebellion in Norfolk (1859))

“Scotland saw peasant revolts against the landowners' commercializing agenda as well In the Levellers Revolt of 1723, up to a thousand Levellers, also known as ‘Dykebreakers,’ knocked down the stone walls enclosing their leased plots, ‘slaughtering some of the cattle within them’---and quite literally leveled the walls that kept livestock within newly created pastures, which had theretofore served as the cereal fields. As The Caledonian Mercury reported in April 1724, ‘[S]everal hundred armed persons subsequently demolished dykes in the neighbourhood.’ The manifesto that the Levellers nailed onto church doors in various towns called for an end to the ‘chain of miseries’ and protested against how landowners made ‘Commonty’ (collectively held land) into the property of individuals. The Levellers also published a steering manifesto, An Account of the Reasons of Some People in Galloway, Their Meetings Anent Public Grievances Through Inclosures, which highlighted the economic and social consequences of enclosure. They claimed that ‘depopulating in closures’ had resulted in rent increases, trade disruption, and the eviction of more than sixty families from parishes in the region, who, they said, either emigrated or committed suicide. Women played a central role in these protests, for example in 1724 when they threw stones at local landowners who tried to arrest a group of rioters. And when Sir Basil Hamilton's dykes were leveled that year, ‘there were a great many lusty young women among them who yet performed greater wonders than men,’ as one contemporary wrote.

“The Levellers questioned central tenets of the emerging capitalist ethos. Protesting the ‘extraordinary Profits which return to a few Landlords,’ they ‘disagree[d] about the Persons to whom the Profits of the Earth should redound,’ Opposing the legitimacy of ‘act[ing] only for my self,’ the Levellers believed that things ‘ought not be done’ if they violated ‘the greater Good of humane Society,’even if ‘there be no particular and express humane Law against it.’ They saw it as ‘a Sin to hinder the Poor from cultivating the Ground.’ Owning a piece of land did not, in their view, give the landowner the right to expel the tenant. ‘[D]efrauding the Poor of the Profits of the Earth, which God hath given to all’ was ungodly. They reserved special wrath for ‘Several of our Landlords [who] are become our Merchants’ and concluded that ‘your Principle, That you may do with, and improve, your own as you please, should not be without Limitation interpreted, as commonly it is; That all the Profits of the Earth do not belong to the Landlords, and that a Man may not, many Times, improve his own Property, to the Prejudice of that Society, whereof he is a Member.’

“Even in the Americas, where the capitalist transformation of the countryside had its most rapid and radical successes, an almost-constant struggle accompanied the expansion of commodity production. Despite ceaseless declarations of their death or disappearance, Indigenous peoples waged a continual war against their dispossession and exploitation. In the seventeenth-century Lesser Antilles, for example; the Kalinagos resisted English settlement, causing the English to conclude that the Kalinagos ‘were a barbarous and cruel set of savages beyond reason or persuasion and must therefore be eliminated.’ Farther north, in the upper reaches of New Spain, in what is today the American state of New Mexico, Spanish settlers and troops plundered, taxed, murdered, and harassed the Pueblo people for almost a century and a half until, according to one Spanish observer, ‘the Indians fear us so much that, on seeing us approach from afar, they flee to the mountains with their women and children, abandoning their homes, and so we take what we wish from them. In the summer of 1680, however, Pueblo communities under the leadership of medicine man Po'pay rebelled and expelled the Spaniards from their lands, securing a decade-long reprieve—a rare victory in an asymmetrical struggle. At the very southern tip of the Americas, in present-day Chile, conflicts with the Mapuche lasted, with varying degrees of intensity, from 1536 to 1883. The Spanish initially triumphed with relative ease, but in 1598 the tides turned, as 300 Mapuche warriors ambushed and decisively defeated 350 men led by Royal Governor Martin Garcia Onez de Loyola, then the highest Spanish authority in Chile. The Mapuche victory at Curalaba triggered a general uprising among the Indigenous population that culminated in the destruction of all seven Spanish cities in the Mapuche territories of southern Chile. As the war progressed, the Mapuche's guerrilla tactics led them to emerge victorious from the century-long warring phase of the conflict.”