A Short History of Enclosure in Britain

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LAW 343 Dispossession Enclosure

Notes

Currently, in our "property-owning democracy”, nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population, while most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line.

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those in favour (including the beneficiaries) insisting that it was necessary for economic development or "improvement”, and those against (including the dispossessed) claiming that it deprived the poor of their livelihoods and led to rural depopulation.

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The overgrazing of English common land has been held up as the archetypal example of the "tragedy of the commons" — the fatal deficiency that a neoliberal intelligentsia holds to be inherent in all forms of common property.

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common property systems allow individuals to benefit at a cost to the community, and therefore are inherently prone to decay,

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most of the above was incidental to his main point which was the need for population control.

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anthropologists and historians who cited innumerable instances where limited common resources were managed satisfactorily.

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The farmers on Hardin's pasture do not seem to talk to one another. As individuals, they are alienated, rational, utility-maximizing automatons and little else.

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there is no evidence, from Hardin or anyone else, that degradation of the land was inevitable or inexorable.

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Private ownership of land, and in particular absolute private ownership, is a modern idea, only a few hundred years old.

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common field system, rather ingeniously, made economies of scale, including use of a whopping great plough team, potentially accessible to small scale farmers. The downside was a sacrifice of freedom (or "choice" as it is now styled),

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"Take note that England is not a Free people, till the Poor that have no Land, have a free allowance to dig and labour the Commons, and so live as Comfortably as the Landlords that live in their Inclosures

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The Diggers appear to be not so much a resistance movement of peasants in the course of being squeezed off the land, as an inspired attempt to reclaim the land by people whose historical ties may well have already been dissolved, some generations previously.

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Without doubt the most viciously repressive legislation enacted in Britain in the last 400 years, this act authorized the death penalty for more than 50 offences connected with poaching.

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less solidarity amongst commoners, because, according to Joan Thirsk, wealthy commoners who could afford to keep more animals over winter (presumably because of agricultural improvements) were overstocking the commons:

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in a deserted Highland glen, you feel that everyone who ever mattered is dead and gone.

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individuals could not innovate;

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waste lands and common pastures were "bare-worn" or full of scrub, and overstocked with half-starved beasts;

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force them into employment.

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when they were overgrazed, that was often as a result of overstocking by the wealthiest commoners

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engross already wealthy landowners, force poor people off the land

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it was downright theft, Millions of people had customary and legal access to lands and the basis of an independent livelihood was snatched away from them

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there was no way in which the government could help the poor, or anybody else, except by increasing the nation's capital

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disturb the "invisible hand” of economic self interest — even though the hand that had made them landless in the first place was by no means invisible,

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might have a lower yield, from his hundred acres, but he would have a larger net profit — and it was from net profit that rent was derived. That was why landlords preferred consolidation.

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it was the same breed of political economists who had previously advocated improvement that was now arguing for grain imports which would make these improvements utterly pointless.

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a necessary evil, and there would have been less harm in it if the increased dividend of the agricultural world had been fairly distributed

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overstocking was carried out by one or two wealthy farmers at the expense of the poorer commoners, who could not overstock, even if they wanted to, because they had not the means to keep large numbers of animals over winter.

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Hardin's construct is like the Chinese game of go where each counter has the same value; real life is more like chess,

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No wonder the commoners were "idle" and unwilling to take on paid employment. "Those who are so eager for the new inclosure,” William Cobbett wrote, "seem to argue as if the wasteland in its present state produced nothing at all. But is this the fact? Can anyone point out a single inch of it which does not produce something and the produce of which is made use of?

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