"Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor. This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place."
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Academics from the United KingdomEconomists from the United KingdomAnthropologists from the United KingdomLabour Party (UK) peoplePolitical authors from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
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Sources
"Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong" (29 January 2019), The Guardian
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jason_Hickel
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Jason Hickel
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