English pauperism surged from mechanization and enclosure, not laziness

Evidence

For the working classes in Great Britain, the immediate and terrible consequences of the Industrial Age are generally, if not precisely, known. In purely economic terms, there is the direct evidence of the workhouses that began in the eighteenth century but achieved their more permanent character in the two decades following Rev. Robert Lowe’s experiment in deterrent welfare in 1818 at Bingham. Though pauperism (which Hobsbawm defines as “the permanent core of poverty”10) as we have suggested earlier was by no means a new phenomenon in England or western Europe before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in England, at least, the numbers of paupers increased somewhat rapidly during this latter period. This seems to have been the direct result of both the interruption of rural life by the adoption of reaping and threshing machines, and by the policy of land enclosures inspired by agricultural capitalism that, between 1760 and 1810, included five million acres of common fields. Elsewhere, in the industrial cores, unemployment accompanied the severe business cycles of the period. The workhouse, whose truest function was to act as asylums of last resort for the poor, was one response of the ruling classes. Characteristically, this response was the rationalization of an almost total misperception of the basis of pauperism: the presumption that the dispossessed and unemployed lacked work discipline. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 222