Enclosure an Inevitable Step Toward Modernization? “Sheep Eat Men” in Technology History

When did modernization really begin?
Not with steam engines and smokestacks—but much earlier, when technology quietly redefined what “efficiency” meant.

This video traces the technological chain that led from medieval agriculture to enclosure, from wool to factories, and from land-bound peasants to the modern working class.
The phrase “Sheep eat men” was not emotional rhetoric—it was a technical diagnosis of a system undergoing structural transformation.

This is a history of technology, not morality.
And it is where industrial civilization truly began.

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🧠 What this video is about

Most narratives of the Industrial Revolution begin in the late 18th century—with steam engines, factories, and machines.

From the perspective of the history of technology, that starting point is already too late.

Industrial civilization began earlier, when a sequence of seemingly modest inventions reshaped:
• how land was used
• how labor was valued
• how markets functioned
• and how production scaled

This documentary follows that sequence step by step—from medieval fields to spinning wheels, from navigation instruments to global trade networks, and finally to enclosure, factories, and resistance.

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⏱ Chapters

00:07 – Opening | When did modernization really begin?
Why steam engines are not the true starting point—and what “Sheep eat men” really meant.

00:50 – The technological ceiling of agrarian society (c. 1000–1400)
Open-field farming, common land, and why medieval agriculture was stable—but capped.

01:40 – The first decisive invention: the spinning wheel (13th–14th century)
How continuous rotary motion turned wool into an industrial input.

02:24 – Loom improvements and workshop specialization (15th–16th centuries)
Division of labor, modular production, and why weaving began to outpace spinning.

03:14 – The magnetic compass (12th–14th centuries)
Why predictability—not speed—changed trade forever.

03:46 – Celestial navigation and the astrolabe (14th–15th centuries)
Measuring latitude and making long-distance voyages systematic.

04:07 – Portolan charts: early information infrastructure (13th–15th centuries)
Navigation as data: ports, bearings, and repeatable routes.

04:34 – The caravel: an engineering breakthrough (15th century)
Why reduced crew size made long-distance trade economically sustainable.

05:02 – A new technological fact emerges (16th century)
Sheep required fewer people than crops. This was not ideology—it was arithmetic.

05:36 – Why enclosure occurred in the sixteenth century
Fences, surveys, documents—and enclosure as a land-management technology.

06:03 – The emergence of the working class (16th–18th centuries)
Labor detached from land, wage dependence, and population concentration.

06:39 – The Spinning Jenny (1764)
Machine replication replaces land expansion.

07:00 – Water Frame & the birth of the factory system
Water power, strong warp yarn, continuous production, and Richard Arkwright.

07:56 – The Luddite movement (1811–1816)
Not anti-technology, but resistance to how technology was deployed.

08:15 – Conclusion | Technology, pain, and the modern world
Why enclosure was technologically likely—even if morally tragic.

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🎥 About this channel

Mechanica Planet explores the deep history of technology—not as a parade of inventions, but as systems that reshape society.

Here, technology is neither hero nor villain.
It is structure.