In this landmark book, the author of The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination and sweeping critique of early-twenty-first-century capitalism. Brett Christophers styles this as 'rentier capitalism', in which ownership of key types of scarce assets-such as land, intellectual property, natural resources, or digital platforms-is all-important and dominated by a few unfathomably wealthy companies and individuals: rentiers.

If a small elite owns today's economy, everybody else foots the bill. Nowhere is this divergence starker, Christophers shows, than in the United Kingdom, where the prototypical ills of rentier capitalism-vast inequalities combined with entrenched economic stagnation-are on full display and have led the country inexorably to the precipice of Brexit.