I’m very interested in that meta point you brought up. Do you know of any books or articles that attempt to comprehensively describe the “before and after” picture of people’s daily lives?
One good book is the one I mentioned in my post, The Discovery of France, by Graham Robb, though, like one might imagine, it’s focused on France. Another good book is Debt: The First 5000 Years, by David Graeber. It’s a bit of an anti-capitalist polemic, but it does go into great detail about how people lived before “modern” industrialization and finance came into their lives and the violence that had to be inflicted on these (mainly colonial) populations in order to get them to accept these institutions. The perennially cited Seeing Like A State is also a good resource, setting up the pattern by which (sometimes) well-meaning reformers screw up traditional societies by attempting to modernize them in a root-and-branch fashion. Finally, Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (available online) covers the workers’ transition from agrarian and handicrafts work to a self-conscious social class.
I’m very interested in that meta point you brought up. Do you know of any books or articles that attempt to comprehensively describe the “before and after” picture of people’s daily lives?
One good book is the one I mentioned in my post, The Discovery of France, by Graham Robb, though, like one might imagine, it’s focused on France. Another good book is Debt: The First 5000 Years, by David Graeber. It’s a bit of an anti-capitalist polemic, but it does go into great detail about how people lived before “modern” industrialization and finance came into their lives and the violence that had to be inflicted on these (mainly colonial) populations in order to get them to accept these institutions. The perennially cited Seeing Like A State is also a good resource, setting up the pattern by which (sometimes) well-meaning reformers screw up traditional societies by attempting to modernize them in a root-and-branch fashion. Finally, Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (available online) covers the workers’ transition from agrarian and handicrafts work to a self-conscious social class.