Can we interpret "abundant" in a Darwinian sense e.g. diversity of life? I would think the industrial farming revolution decreased crop variety over time same for animal lineages aside from the rapid increase in mixed poodle breeds.

Crop variety was decreased by the original farming revolution, about 10k years before the industrial revolution. Rather than eating whatever was available, the large majority of the caloric input of an agricultural society comes from a few staple crops optimized for overwinter storability and producing large yields and thus supporting a large number of people.

The industrial revolution didn’t qualitatively change farming. It just made it possible to have more of it thanks to machine labor. The same goes for the later agricultural revolutions.

This is particularly evident if you had been around rural villages in eastern Europe in the late 00s, particularly those inhabited by elderly people at 70 years old and above.

They were still doing subsistence agriculture to supplement their own income well into the 21th century. Of course they didn't grow enough calorie heavy crops like corn, potatoes or wheat to live entirely off the land, but they had enough food that a bi-monthly shopping trip with their children was enough to get by.

No, they totally grew enough calories for themselves. My grandparents lived like that. They farmed around 15 hectares, which was actually quite a lot. You can easily grew enough calories for your family on 5 hectares, or even less if you have access to modern cultivars and artificial fertilizer. It’s just even poor people like variety, and will trade some of their crops for stuff they cannot make at home efficiently, like sugar, fish, or candy.

To add, I don’t think my ancestor Spaniards for example needed the help of machines to deplete mines in America. They also came already equipped with all kinds of legal systems, including the Requerimiento, which they read out loud to natives in preposterous spectacle.

In general the transition from feudalism to capitalism, including the formation of the legal systems that supported the latter, happened gradually for maybe up to four or five centuries before the steam engine had been invented.

Sure, the Industrial Revolution further accelerated the development of property rights, mercantile, and civil laws, but all in all I don’t think there’s much truth that machines were the primary cause of such developments.

Not really Malthusian. Agricultural societies had adapted to keep the population stable during normal times and bounce back in a generation or two after bad times. Those cultural adaptations stopped working when childhood mortality declined.

Useful land was a scarce resource in more civilized regions, while labor was cheap. Given enough land, subsistence farmers could easily feed themselves outside particularly bad years. But much of the land belonged to local elites, and commoners had to work that land to fund the pursuits of the elites.