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[...] What made this famine so appalling was that it was completely avoidable; it would never have happened if peasants had retained full rights to their ancestral land, where they would have had plenty of space to produce a diversity of crops. In other words, the scarcity that led to the famine wa…

Adam Smith [...] called this 'previous accumulation' [...] Karl Marx called it 'primitive accumulation', perhaps to highlight its barbaric nature, for the process of accumulation was violent

[...] The sugar and cotton plantations of the New World supplied Europe with another ecological windfall, much as silver did. For example, sugar came to account for up to 22 per cent of the calories Britain consumed, which reduced the need for domestic agricultural production and freed up labour po…

[...] achieving this level of growth would mean driving global per capita income up to $1.3 million. In other words, the average income would have to be $1.3 million per year simply so that the poorest two-thirds of humanity could earn $5 per day. This gives us a sense of just how deeply inequali…