What I’m Reading: Anton Howes, The Century-Long Depression in Age of Invention (Aug. 26, 2025)

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Age of Invention: The Century-Long Depression

There’s an old proverb about England, current in the sixteenth century, that it was a hell for horses, a paradise for women, and a purgatory or pris…

Anton Howes @ ageofinvention.xyz

Compared to the world of work today, with all its occasional frustrations and boredoms, having to work for a wage in the four or so centuries c.1350-1750 was a dystopian nightmare, with England pursuing policies sometimes so absurdly and ambitiously oppressive that as I discovered more about them my jaw just kept on dropping.

I believe their impact has been highly underrated, based on the belief that they weren’t regularly enforced. But the evidence, to me, suggests that they were on the whole adhered to, and so they would have hugely distorted the functioning of the English economy. I haven’t seen the full scale of the policies set out before in all their detail, and I think some important details have hitherto been missed or misinterpreted. So what follows is the long, appalling history of how England created its prison for servants, and of how this led to a century of economic depression. . . .

— Anton Howes, The Century-Long Depression
Age of Invention (Aug. 26, 2025)