The Servile State

In his treatise on European economic history (The Servile State, 1912) Hilaire Belloc explores the many failings of the Capitalist system. He explains that Capitalism emerged from the English Reformation, reached its present form during England's Industrial Revolution, and from there was exported to the rest of the world. “It was in England that the Industrial System arose. It was in England that all its traditions and habits were formed; and because the England in which it arose was already a Capitalist England, modern Industrialism, wherever you see it at work to-day, having spread from England, has proceeded upon the Capitalist model.” Belloc also suggests that Capitalism has supplanted another, earlier system, one that had developed throughout Catholic Europe, a system he and his good friend G.K. Chesterton referred to as “Distributism.” “Property was an institution native to the State and enjoyed by the great mass of its