In Chapter 3, I argued that in late eighteenth-century Britain, lazy and predatory capital owners – the original targets of Puritan critique – hijacked the work ethic and turned it against workers. These were the great landlords, rentiers, crony capitalists (including the shareholders and managers of the piratical East India Company, colonial slaveholders, and other state-sponsored imperialist ventures), schemers, and monopolists. These were people who got rich not from hard work, saving, and prudent investment in the real economy, but from merely passive ownership of property, state favoritism, market manipulation, financial speculation, and oppression of the less advantaged, especially of workers, tenants, and needy borrowers. One measure of its economic effects is the gap between productivity growth and wage growth. During Engels’s Pause, from the turn of the nineteenth century to mid-century, British wages stagnated even as productivity galloped ahead.