#economic history

Tagged economic history · show all articles

A peat bank cut back in clean steps on open moorland, its exposed face showing the full depth of the deposit, with a worn steel peat iron standing in the top step and one freshly cut turf balanced half off its blade above a weathered timber barrow

Power Density and What It Permits

Watts per square metre of land is the least fashionable number in energy analysis and one of the most revealing. It explains what pre-fossil societies could not build — and it is contested in ways worth understanding.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 9, 2026 · 18 min read

A hand-operated stocking frame in a whitewashed workshop with a partly knitted worsted web hanging from its needle bar, a cast lead weight swinging slightly on the web, a chalked slate of piece rates propped against the frame and a stool pushed back from the treadles

Labour & Technology

What the Machine Breakers Actually Wanted

The framebreakers of 1811 were not protesting machinery. They were protesting the use of machinery to evade apprenticeship, quality customs and agreed piece rates — and that is the part the word Luddite erases.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 8, 2026 · 17 min read

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