A book in fourteen chapters
Human Farm
How a tiny super-elite, and the 1% who serve it, have farmed the other 99% — from the first cities to today
Five thousand years ago, in the city of Uruk, someone pressed a stylus into wet clay to record a quantity of barley that other people had grown. The first human being we can call by name was an accountant. This book argues that the arrangement on that tablet — a few who own the storehouse, a few more who keep the books, and a great many who produce what flows into it — has survived every change of era, costume and creed, and that each age has invented a new story to make it feel natural. It is a history of the mechanism, not of villains: no conspiracy is needed for the farm to work.
Every chapter looks through the same five questions. The fence: what stops the many leaving or refusing. The feed: what is taken, from grain to attention. The shepherds: the managers who run the farm for its owners. The story: the belief that makes it feel just. And the breakout: who fought it, and what the farm did next.
- 1. Introduction: The FarmAbout 29 min
- 2. The First Harvest: Sumer and EgyptAbout 28 min
- 3. Kings Made by Gods: Bronze Age Empires and the Invention of LegitimacyAbout 26 min
- 4. Citizens and Slaves: Athens and RomeAbout 26 min
- 5. Lords, Serfs and Salvation: Medieval EuropeAbout 27 min
- 6. Empires of the East: China, India and the Islamic WorldAbout 28 min
- 7. Enclosure: The Land Becomes PrivateAbout 25 min
- 8. The Plantation: Atlantic Slavery and the Colonial FarmAbout 24 min
- 9. The Factory: Industrial CapitalismAbout 23 min
- 10. The Ledger: Money, Banks and Debt as the Modern FenceAbout 23 min
- 11. The Managed Herd: The Welfare State and Its RetreatAbout 22 min
- 12. The Invisible Fence: Media, Education and the Story of MeritAbout 23 min
- 13. The Data Farm: The Digital AgeAbout 22 min
- 14. Breakouts, and What Comes NextAbout 23 min