[notahacker]

tbh he's not wrong that the article says more about the partisan slant of the authors than it does about British industrial history. The article touches upon self sufficiency with the argument that that peasants could have made their own shoes from their own leather in a matter of hours so buying them proved they were poorer (a particular load of er... old cobblers) and I'm not sure various quotes about peasants being lazy proves anything more than the fact snobbery existed.

There's plenty of actually problematic stuff (the Enclosure Act) that happened to the British peasantry mostly before the Industrial Revolution without taking the view that peasantry was a particularly pleasant lifestyle that nobody would volunteer to change.

[unity1001]

> (the Enclosure Act) that happened to the British peasantry mostly before the Industrial Revolution

The industrial revolution was already starting at that point. We associate the industrial revolution with machinization, but it was in fact translation of old feudal modes of land ownership to the entire economy. This trend started with the wool trade and the feudal lords finding wool trade more profitable than feudal land ownership. Coupled with the new modes of economic organization created during the Age of Exploration (corporations, stocks), this removed the incentive for the feudal aristocracy to maintain farming as a means of income and pushed them to maximize their revenue by moving to various emerging trades, with wool trade being the first. The pushing out of the peasants from the commons started around that time. What extra happened during the period that is directly labeled as the Industrial Revolution is just using the same method to push the peasantry into factories.

[nerdponx]

I think it's completely legitimate to ask, who benefits from denigrating peasants?

There is historical precedent for social biases being developed in order to justify economic and political institutions. It's often said for example that this is where modern racism comes from, a moral workaround for the obvious immorality of the Atlantic slave trade.

Thus, the presence of some kind of social or cultural bias might be a useful indicator of the presence of a developing or existing socioeconomic/political power dynamic.

I think self-sufficiency is a red herring here. Maybe the author was taken in by some kind of Marxist pre-industrial pastoral fantasy, but that doesn't mean they didn't make some good points along the way.