New Afterword for The Divide

The Divide was first published in 2017. In the years since, many people have written to me, or approached me during public events, to share the impact it had on them. I am always grateful for this. And yet as a researcher, I look back on the text now and wish that it could include all that I have learned over the past seven years. Knowledge moves quickly, and I want to make it available to readers. My goal with The Divide was to serve as an accessible introduction. I hope it continues to do that for readers. But - until Penguin is ready to produce a new edition - here are some resources that I encourage people to explore for more information and new knowledge.

1. On the rise of capitalism in Europe

The Divide briefly describes the violent processes of enclosure and dispossession that accompanied the rise of capitalism in Europe during the long 16th century. This description is improved with new information and references in the opening chapters of Less is More. It describes how worker revolutions brought down feudalism and improved human welfare, before elites responded with enclosure and other interventions to push wages back down and restore working-class subordination.

2. On the human toll of colonialism and capitalist integration

The Divide describes the devastating suffering that was inflicted on people in Asia, Africa and the Americas as they were colonized and forcibly integrated into the capitalist world-economy. In a recent article for World Development, we assessed this history more systematically by looking at empirical data on real wages, human height and mortality rates from the 16th century onward. We found that the rise of capitalism and its imposition around the world was associated with a striking decline in social indicators, with wages often crashing to below subsistence and mass mortality crises occurring in several regions. In the global South, recovery only began during the 20th century, coinciding with the rise of progressive and radical anti-colonial movements that reclaimed control over national resources and production.[1]

This history offers an important counterpoint to dominant narratives claiming that capitalism rescued people from widespread extreme poverty. Quite the opposite is true: capitalism caused widespread extreme poverty, and progress in human development was brought by progressive social movements and governments in the post-colonial era. This history is also captured in Amya Kumar Bagchi’s book Perilous Passage: Mankind and