Wendy McElroy on the Enclosure Acts, exploitation and the Industrial Revolution

It would be deceptively simplistic to blame the Enclosure Acts alone for the impoverishment usually ascribed to the Industrial Revolution.  Many factors were in play.  For example, the majority of people in pre-Industrial England dwelt in the countryside, where they often supplemented their income through cottage industries, especially the weaving of wool.  This income evaporated with the advent of cheap cotton and industrialized methods of weaving it.  Many influences contributed to the desperation of an unemployed army of workers. 

What enclosure does illustrate without question, however, is that the abuses ascribed to the Industrial Revolution are far from straightforward.  Blaming industrialization for workers’ misery is not merely simplistic, it is also often incorrect.  Whether or not some exploitation would have existed within free-market industrialization, the abuses of the Industrial Revolution were standardized, institutionalized, and carried to excess by government and the use of the political means.

~ Wendy McElroy, "The Enclosure Acts and the Industrial Revolution," Future of Freedom Foundation, March 8, 2012