# The Divide  ## Metadata - Author: [[Jason Hickel]] - Full Title: The Divide - Category: #books ## Highlights - Today, some 4.3 billion people – more than 60 per cent of the world’s population – live in debilitating poverty, struggling to survive on less than the equivalent of $5 per day. ([Location 43](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=43)) - eight richest men in the world have as much wealth between them as the poorest half of the world’s population combined. ([Location 46](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=46)) - The arc of history bends towards justice, Martin Luther King Jr once said. But it won’t bend on its own. ([Location 79](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=79)) - Today there are about 800 million hungry people, even according to the most conservative measures. More realistic estimates put the figure at around 2 billion – nearly a third of all humanity. ([Location 201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=201)) - we already produce more than enough food each year to feed all 7 billion of the world’s people, with plenty left over for another 3 billion. ([Location 203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=203)) - 2015, the United Nations published the final report of the Millennium Development Goals – the world’s first major public commitment to reduce poverty – claiming that the poverty rate had been cut in half since 1990. ([Location 205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=205)) - First, almost all of the gains against poverty have happened in one place, China. ([Location 208](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=208)) - early 2014, Oxfam reported that the richest eighty-five people had come to accumulate more wealth than the poorest 50 per cent of the world’s population, or 3.6 billion people. ([Location 224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=224)) - The following year things had already become worse – and so too the year after that. And in early 2017, as the World Economic Forum met in Davos, Oxfam announced that the richest eight people had as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion. ([Location 226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=226)) - Latin American economy was organised by the colonisers to produce only a handful of agricultural products, it was prevented from developing its own domestic industries. Instead, it became dependent on Europe for the manufactured goods it needed. ([Location 994](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=994)) - Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, called this ‘previous accumulation’ – the initial process of amassing capital that is necessary for capitalism to get going, and without which capitalism cannot exist. ([Location 1013](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1013)) - Karl Marx called it ‘primitive accumulation’, perhaps to highlight its barbaric nature, for the process of accumulation was violent: ‘The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. ([Location 1014](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1014)) - In order for capitalism to work, it needs something else: it needs workers. ([Location 1024](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1024)) - Up through the Middle Ages, the vast majority of people in Europe – at least outside the city states – wouldn’t have wanted to work for wages. People didn’t need to earn wages in order to live. Most people lived as ‘peasants’ ([Location 1026](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1026)) - 15th century – a process that started in England. Wealthy nobles, eager to profit from the highly lucrative wool trade, began a systematic campaign to turn their land into sheep pasture. To do this, they dissolved old feudal obligations and abolished the right of habitation that had protected peasants for so many centuries. ([Location 1037](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1037)) - the monarchy eventually stepped in to curtail the growing powers of the landlords, defending peasants’ traditional rights to common lands. But its efforts were defeated after the English Civil War in the 1640s, which limited the powers of the Crown and allowed the landlord class – which came to control Parliament – to more or less do what they wanted. ([Location 1061](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1061)) - Parliament itself became a powerful instrument of enclosure, designing legislation that formally extinguished peasants’ rights to the commons and enabled ‘the clearing of the estates’ – a national programme designed to ‘sweep’ human beings off the elite’s newly privatised landholdings. ([Location 1065](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1065)) - Between 1760 and 1870, some 7 million acres were enclosed by acts of Parliament – about one-sixth of England. ([Location 1067](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1067)) - By the middle of the 19th century it was complete: there was almost no common land left and millions of people had been forcibly displaced. ([Location 1069](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1069)) - displaced peasants had no way to feed themselves, save for one last option: to sell their labour for wages. ([Location 1075](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1075)) - The impoverished refugees provided the cheap labour necessary to fuel the Industrial Revolution, since they had no choice but to accept the slavery-like conditions and rock-bottom wages of factory work. ([Location 1082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B073SG4L8T&location=1082))