The enclosures, not the steam engine, caused the Great Transformation

Evidence

My point was that the reason the steam engine changed the world, rather than ending up a showpiece in some ruler’s landscaped garden, was the epic raid on the common lands that had preceded its invention: the enclosures. The singularity we now call the Great Transformation – the name given by the great theorist Karl Polyani to the birth of the market society over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – involved precisely this sequence: first the plunder of the common lands, made possible by brute state violence, and only then Watt’s splendid technological breakthrough. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 280

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to narrative of commons enclosure preceding technological breakthrough that will be mapped onto cloud capital in the next paragraph. — connects to: Colonialism’s engine was its underlying thought structure, not its technology — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 270

Broader Connections

• Colonialism’s engine was its underlying thought structure, not its technology #qualifies (0.75) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 270