Everywhere, that was the case. In Britain, the period after The Glorious Revolution was a period of Liberal Democracy, in which the greatest freedom was the freedom of property. Only those with property had the right to vote, under a regime that was a model for the kind of benevolent despotism described by the Classical Liberals, like Lord Acton, admired so much by the 20th century Libertarians such as Hayek. The protected home market, together with the expansion of the colonial empire, gave a spur to domestic industry, and leads to the Industrial Revolution. But it, in turn, accelerates the competition amongst the domestic producers, and incentivized production on a larger scale, expropriating not only the former small producers, but also the small capitalists themselves. As industrial production increases, its demands for agricultural products rises sharply, and the old feudal agriculture cannot meet its needs. Agriculture must become larger-scale, and capitalist itself, resulting in land clearances, enclosures and so on.
The same was true in France. The bourgeois revolution carried through the agrarian revolution, breaking up the old landed estates, and distributing land to the peasants. But, now, those peasants were drawn into commodity production and increasing competition with each other. They took on loans and mortgages to improve their farms, to be more competitive, and found, now, as Marx sets out in The Eighteenth Brumaire, that they had exchanged exploitation at the hands of the landlords to an even more onerous exploitation at the hands of money-lenders.
In Russia, The Emancipation of The Serfs, had the same result, as, in order to pay the loans to cover the redemption payments, etc., they had to engage in commodity production and increasing competition between themselves, leading to an accelerated differentiation into winners and losers, bourgeois and proletarians.
The likes of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts Movement, sought to resist the inevitable progress towards large-scale industrial production, by promoting the old, skilled artisan production. But, such production is, inevitably, inefficient, and its products, thereby, costly. It can form a niche market for the affluent, middle-class, but their affluence and ability to engage in such consumption is, itself, only possible because of the wealth created by the large-scale capitalist production they look down their noses at.
Proudhon put forward similar ideas in France, and the Narodniks did, in Russia. But, as Marx set out against Proudhon, and Lenin set out against the Narodniks, for all of their intentions to resist that inevitable, and progressive, forward march of history, their proposals to foster the development of the small producer/petty-bourgeoisie only further led to the advance of that large-scale production. The greater the mass of those small producers, the greater the ferocity of the competition between them, the more miserable their condition – a miserable condition they only lessen by even more cruelly exploiting any workers they employed – and the more subordinated they are to to the dominance of the large-scale producers. The more, indeed, does their condition deteriorate, even compared to that of the workers employed by large-scale capital.
Engels sets out the conditions pertaining in that initial period of Liberal Democracy, and rampant free market competition, idealised by the petty-bourgeois Libertarians, in which, today, we see it demanded that workers cannot be paid even a living wage, if their small business employers are to exist, as though the latter have some natural right to exist.
“The rapid growth of industry on a capitalistic basis raised the poverty and misery of the working masses to a condition of existence of society. (Cash payment increasingly became, in Carlyle's phrase, the sole social nexus.) The number of crimes increased from year to year. Though not eradicated, the feudal vices which had previously been flaunted in broad daylight were now at any rate thrust into the background. In their stead, the bourgeois vices, hitherto nursed in secret, began to blossom all the more luxuriantly. Trade developed more and more into swindling. The “fraternity” of the revolutionary slogan was realized in the chicanery and envy of the battle of competition. Oppression by force was replaced by corruption; the sword, as the prime social lever, by money. “The right of the first night” passed from the feudal lords to the bourgeois manufacturers. Prostitution assumed hitherto unheard of proportions. Marriage itself remained as before the legally recognised form, the official cloak of prostitution, and, moreover, was copiously supplemented by adultery.” (p 328-9)
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