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Disagree all you want, it won't change the facts. There was no single template for urbanization in Europe. France was different from England, Germany different from France, Russia different from Germany, and so on. Even in England you are somehow ignoring the fact that the Enclosure Acts were an expression of the power relationships that were an inherent part of the pre-industrial agrarian society you so idealize.  And while you are right that farmers aren't eager to be thrown off their land, at various times and places many have voluntarily left it because they believed that life in the cities would be better. Often they were right, sometimes they weren't. That wasn't necessarily because things had gotten worse for them in absolute terms, but because life had gotten better in the cities - i.e. their relative standard of living had declined. This was especially the case in post WWII Western Europe, not exactly the heyday of neo-liberalism. And in Eastern Europe which experienced even greater rates of urbanization during that period there was no capitalism at all. Nor was all the urbanization coerced, particularly in the post-Stalinist period when the Party authorities began to invest heavily into improving urban living standards.
by MarekNYC on Wed Jan 10th, 2007 at 07:31:54 PM EST
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