\paperw3360 \margr0\margl0\ATXph16380 \plain \fs20 \f1 \fs22 In Britain, what remained of the ancient collective economy of the village was swept away between 1760 and 1830 by th
e Enclosure Acts that destroyed the old ôopen fieldö system of farming and provided for effective drainage, crop rotation and hedging. Such policies favoured the richer, more extensive landowners, but left the rural poor without common land for grazing.
They were thus forced to migrate towards the coal-mines, iron-works and cities, where nascent industry offered ill-paid jobs. This brought about a dramatic rise in the non-agricultural population, which in its turn meant that farming was increasingly gea
red to feeding the new recruits to towns and industry and to providing a mechanism for the accumulation of capital\b \b0 to be used in the more modern sectors of the economy. There were about 5,500,000 people in England and Wales at the end of the 17th
century. By 1800, this had risen to nearly nine million, of which one million in London alone. The British capital was then the biggest city in the world. \par
