The advent of capitalism is inextricably bound with the beginning of colonialism, expropriation, and slavery. The peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Americas paid the heaviest price in the economic rise of the Western world. But the exploitation of the European working classes was also a crucial part of the industrialization process.

In the eyes of European society, capitalism is still mostly perceived as a liberating force, one that laid the foundations for a privileged contemporary lifestyle. Yet even in the parts of the world that primarily benefitted from the system, the downsides of capitalism were plain to see. Perhaps, if we look a little closer to home, these uncomfortable truths will be harder to ignore.

The work of Italian historian Franco Ramella has made an important contribution to this work of exposure. Ramella’s book Terra e telai: sistemi di parentela e manifattura nel Biellese dell’Ottocento (Land and Looms: Kinship Systems and Manufacturing in Nineteenth-Century Biella) completely overturns the traditional view of the Italian countryside in the nineteenth century. His microhistorical approach to textile manufactures reveals how industrial capitalism imposed a much harder regime of exploitation and new forms of precarity, bringing misery into the lives of both peasants and factory workers.