by jodrellblank | 2025-08-27 11:13:36+00:00
> "much of slavery was chosen"

Have you ever thought of "choosing slavery" for yourself and your children? No, because given a choice, nobody would choose to be a slave. The fact that people "choose" to be slaves is evidence that they had Hobson's choice. Probably because the wealthy and powerful arranged the system and laws to give people no choice because they wanted slaves.

> "When money sets the rules there is no exploitation

People didn't freely choose to migrate from their ancestral homeland, farming and hunting and grazing animals on common ground, to go and "find their fortune" in the slums and workhouses of the growing urban areas; the land was taken by force, the laws were set by the wealthy to kick the commoners off, to make wild grazing and hunting illegal, to shift the taxes away from land and onto trade, and the commoners were forced into it or "choose" starvation. William the 'Conqueror' in 1066 in Britain started it and set the model for the British colonies and British Empire which pushed it out around the world. From[1]:

"the Anglo-Saxon period as the system of law know as ‘folkland’, whereby land was held in allodial title by the group or regional community .. 1066-7 Norman invasion displaces Anglo-Saxon commons/land ownership model. William the Bastard declares that all land, animals and people in the country belong to him personally. .. We go from a country in which >90% of people owned land, to a country of landless serfs, themselves owned by foreign lords. .. The intended effect was precisely the result: the dispossession of the ‘common folk’ (i.e. anyone who wasn’t a Latin speaking Norman aristocrat) of their ancestral lands and rights."

"Commons Act 1236 allowed Lords to enclose common land .. Statutes of Westminster 1275/85/90 restrict subtenure/sale of parcels of land other than to the direct heirs of the landlord. These restrictions gave rise to .. the retention and control by the nobility of land, money, soldiers and servants via salaries, land sales and rent. In-effect, this was the start of modern wage-slavery"

"1536 to 1541 Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, who privatises church lands (then 1/5th of the country). As these lands were often used by commoners, for grazing – this dispossesses people further from essential access to the land and generates yet more landless people who are wholly dependent upon the emerging model of selling their labour to survive i.e. wage-slavery. 1671 Game Act made it illegal to hunt wild animals, considered a common right since time immemorial. 1700-1850 Parliamentary Enclosures, now no longer held back by the sections of the Church, nor by the power of the (heavily indebted) nobility and Monarchy, land enclosures increase exponentially in both speed and size, and the new urban slums grew correspondingly"

"By 1700 half all arable lands are enclosed, and by 1815 nearly all farm land was enclosed; hunting, grazing, pannage, foraging, wood collection and gleaning rights, are all but lost. From 1750 to 1820 desperate poachers were ‘hanged en-mass’. 1800-1850 the Highland Clearances led to the displacement of up to 500,000 Highlanders and crofters, tens of thousands of which died in the early-mid 19th century, their settlements and economies replaced by Sheep. An esteemed member of the ‘British’ aristocracy noted: ‘It is time to make way for the grand-improvement of mutton over man.’. 1790-1830 a third of the rural population migrates to urban slums. Where they are put to work in early forms of factories, workhouses"

[1] https://tlio.org.uk/a-short-angry-history-of-land-in-britain...