It is well known that J. R. R. Tolkien held to a bucolic fantasy of pre-industrial England as a Utopia, as portrayed in the Shire in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Mordor, its polar opposite, represents everything wrong with dehumanized, imperial, warmongering industrial society. The Dark Satanic Mills of William Blake, while we are at it.
The Shire is what you get if you pluck a farming region in the medieval pre-enclosure, pre-industrial English Midlands out of space and time, omitting its feudal overlords and all of the surrounding peoples who so frequently invaded England since before the Romans (like the Germanic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; and the Danes, the Norwegians, the Irish, and eventually the Norman French coming into various parts of Britain). And shrinking the people, of course.
Without the aristocratic landowners, you also have to omit the system of land tenancy and serfdom that made most of the population unfree peasants. Tolkien kept almost all of the supposed virtues of the sturdily independent yeoman freeholder farmer, and allowed no worse note of discord in the Shire than Lobelia Baggins coveting Bilbo's extensive but cozy burrow, and stealing his spoons.
Then Tolkien simply ignored all of the marauding forces in Middle Earth that would have pounced on such a defenseless territory, including but not limited to humans, wood elves, orcs, and more, even before we get to Sauron's particular minions. The Hobbits meet them all, but always elsewhere, except for one near-encounter with one Nazgul.
Until Saruman and Grima Wormtongue arrive, and turn the Shire into an industrial Hell.
But how does this relate to us? I'm glad you asked that.