ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to take up first, from a critical perspective, the question of whether the peasant populations displaced by emerging capitalism did get re-absorbed entirely into more productive occupations within their own countries or whether large-scale out-migration helps to explain rising domestic wages. Two separate processes of economic and social change tend to get mixed up when the chapter talk of agricultural revolution preceding industrial revolution in England in the eighteenth century or in the other European countries somewhat later. The first is the displacement of the small peasantry through land enclosures and other means, and the second is the rise in productivity which is supposed to have resulted from the larger-scale capitalist production which followed such displacement of peasants. Global interdependence in the past produced in today's developing countries falling nutritional standards and even famine, on the one hand, and promoted underemployment and unemployment on the other.
