The Servile State

The Servile State is a book written by Hilaire Belloc in 1912 about economics. Although it mentions Distributism, for which he and his friend G.K. Chesterton are famous, it avoids explicit advocation for that economic system. This book lays out, in very broad outline, Belloc's version of European economic history: starting with ancient states, where slavery was critical to the economy, through the medieval economies based on serf and peasant labor, to capitalism. Belloc argues that the development of capitalism was not a natural consequence of the Industrial Revolution, but a consequence of the earlier dissolution of the monasteries in England, which then shaped the course of English industrialization.