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> A lot of that surplus population couldn't live off the land, since it was already at capacity in most of the Western Europe, so they moved to cities, hoping t

• rablackburn 3y ago
  A combination of enclosures (which had be going on for centuries and peaked in the 18th century with the Inclosure Act), and the Agricultural Revolution which greatly reduced the labour required in the fields (so if you had transitioned from working the commons to getting wages for working private land, you just stopped getting enough work). So you had industrialists setting up factories needing cheap labour to run the machines, and a mass exodus of the countryside population to the cities desperate for work. Hello Dickens. This is how you get an explosion in petty crime, disease, poverty, hulks, and eventually, transportation of the troublesome poor to Australia. The industrial revolution was so destabilising to society that colonialism was a very convenient solution. Just go somewhere else, shoot the natives who resist, and the poors can have that land.