Apostles of Inequality : Rural Poverty, Political Economy, and the 'Economist', 1760-1860 - Jim Handy

Apostles of Inequality

Rural Poverty, Political Economy, and the 'Economist', 1760-1860

By: Jim Handy

Hardcover | 1 January 2022

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Apostles of Inequality explores how changes to land use and ideas about political economy in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century England drove cottagers from the land and impoverished rural workers.

Between 1760 and 1860, the English countryside was subject to constant attempts at agricultural improvement. Most often these meant depriving cottagers and rural workers of access to land they could cultivate, despite evidence that they were the most productive farmers in a country constantly short of food.

Drawing from a wide range of contemporary sources, Apostles of Inequality argues that such attempts, driven by a flawed faith in the wonders of capital, did little to increase agricultural productivity and instead led to a century of increasing impoverishment in rural England. Jim Handy rejects the assertions about the benefits that accompanied the transition to "improved" agriculture and details the abundant evidence for the efficiency of smallholder, peasant agriculture. He traces the development of both economic theory and government policy through the work of agricultural improver Arthur Young (1741–1820), government advisor Nassau William Senior (1790–1864), and the editors and writers of the Economist, as well as Adam Smith and Thomas Robert Malthus.

Apostles of Inequality demonstrates how a fascination with capital – promoted by political economy and farmers’ desires to have a labour force completely dependent on wage labour – fostered widespread destitution in rural England for over a century.
Industry Reviews

Apostles of Inequality is another magnificent book by Jim Handy, who is rightly considered a 'historian of peasants.' Handy's narration is not merely of historical interest: it indirectly sheds light on much of what is happening in rural areas around the world today through land grabbing, famine, extreme exploitation and oppression, and the responses of migration and/or resistance.

- Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Professor Emeritus, Wageningen University, and Adjunct Professor, China Agricultural University

Eloquent and engaged, this book describes how 'the fairy dust of political economy' legitimized the dispossession and impoverishment of small landholders on three continents. Aware of the productivity and sustainability of this land before the onslaught of capital began, and alert to attempts to resist it, this book is a powerful indictment of the view that we can make progress when we also create poverty.

- Jeanette M. Neeson, Professor Emeritus of History, York University and author of Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820

In this timely, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking work, Jim Handy dissects the way the discourse in which capital is given an almost magical status was articulated, justified, and used as the basis for 'solutions' to all that ailed agricultural progress in Britain and her dominions. Drawing on the writings of Arthur Young, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Nassau Senior, and the Economist, Handy artfully demonstrates, though, that a blind devotion to the 'pure principles' of political economy came at a wretched cost, and that the advocates of the power of capital became 'apostles of poverty' and even apologists for enslavement.

- Carl Griffin, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Sussex

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