Agrarian Roots of Capitalism

Capitalism’s formative transformations occurred heavily in the countryside and through agrarian change—land markets, coerced labor, and rural commodity chains—not only in factories and cities. Understanding modern capitalism therefore requires tracing rural property relations, imperial extraction, and global commodity networks alongside industrial histories. — Re-centering agriculture and rural coercion in narratives of capitalism shifts policy focus to land law, labor regimes, global commodity governance, and reparations or trade rules rather than only urban industrial policy.