Over the years historians have adopted this term to describe the "laws" of industrial capitalism. For example, economic historian Ellen Meiksins Wood documents the origins of capitalism in the changing relations between English property owners and tenant farmers, as the owners began to favor productivity over coercion: "The new historical dynamic allows us to speak of 'agrarian capitalism' in early modern England, a social form with distinctive 'laws of motion' that would eventually give rise to capitalism in its mature, industrial form."

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 204