## Metadata - Author: [[Jason Hickel]] - Full Title: The Divide - Category: #books ## Highlights - And in terms of the balance of global power, Europe in 1500 – just emerging from the Dark Ages – was little more than a backwater, accounting for only 15 per cent of global GDP. By contrast, China and India together controlled 65 per cent of the world economy. ([Location 886](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=886)) - They had no homes, no land, no food. It was a humanitarian catastrophe: for the first time in history, a significant proportion of the population had no access to any form of livelihood for survival. By the middle of the 1600s, the word ‘poverty’ had come into common use to describe this new condition, and during the late 18th and early 19th centuries the term became entrenched as a major concept in English-language discourse. ([Location 1071](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1071)) - It was these three forces – enclosure, mass displacement of peasants and the creation of a consumer market – that provided the internal conditions for the Industrial Revolution. The external conditions, as we have seen, had to do with the colonisation of the Americas and the slave trade. ([Location 1093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1093)) - Previously, monarchs, conquistadors and feudal landlords directly appropriated wealth from others either by stealing it from them or by forcing them to pay tribute. In other words, they relied on some kind of direct coercive force. But under the new system such direct coercion was no longer necessary. The elite simply relied on the fact that the competitive pressures of the labour market (and the market in leases) would increase workers’ productivity at a much higher rate than the one at which their wages increased. This was the basic mechanism of profit, and it served as an automatic conveyor belt for redistributing wealth upwards. ([Location 1096](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1096)) - By the early 1800s, once the enclosure movement had run its violent course over two to three centuries, Irish peasants had so little land for their own use that they were planting only potatoes – the one crop that would yield sufficient calories for them to survive on very small plots. ([Location 1120](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1120)) - This dependency on potatoes proved deadly when the potato blight hit in 1845. Over the next seven years 1 million people died – more than 10 per cent of the Irish population – in what became known as the Great Famine. ([Location 1122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1122)) - In the Western imagination, Africa is stereotyped as a continent plagued by corrupt dictators, with the supposition being that Africans are perhaps too ‘primitive’ to appreciate the virtues of Western-style democracy. But the truth is that ever since the end of colonialism, Africans have been actively prevented from establishing democracies. The legacy of strongman rule in Africa is largely a Western invention, not an indigenous proclivity. Western powers have thwarted countless attempts at real independence, which casts a rather ironic light on the West’s historical image as a beacon of democracy and popular sovereignty. ([Location 1690](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1690))