Husbanding the Earth and Hedging Out the Poor

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LAW 343 Dispossession Enclosure

Notes

the idea of improvement and how it affected attitudes towards property and ownership in the mid-seventeenth century.

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contemporary challenges to improvement and enclosure, highlighting the contests and debates around treating nature as a resource, and the resistance of the poor to being transformed into a labour force.

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The writers followed a set of self-imposed rules — their books should be cheap, straightforwardly written, and any suggestions they made should be based on experiment

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improvement was fundamental to God’s intentions for the earth and for mankind.

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A good husbandman, however, could reverse this decay, and so mend the effects of the Fall.

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Wild and vacant wastelands were regarded ‘like a deformed Chaos’ which brought discredit to the commonwealth

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those who lived and worked on the common lands were not ‘improvers’ or true husbandmen.

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or the improvers, the commons were wasted, desolate and chaotic. They generated unemployment, idleness, vagrancy and crime, and were directly opposed to the ideal of enclosure and increased productivity.

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tended to discount the importance of common rights and community assets

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Men should stop trying to gain estates and plenty through non-productive exchange for immediate consumption. Instead they should ‘strive to gaine it at first hand Qut of the Earth, the True Mother’

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arguing that the commons themselves allowed landlords to abuse and exploit the poor.

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This distinction between having an interest and claiming a right was the core of the disagreement between enclosers and defenders of the commons.

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For them, God was not a mystical husbandman, but the chief owner and steward of the earth. He was in control of the land itself, rather than interested in its fruits and productivity.

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The danger for Blith lay in the poor organising themselves to claim absolute rights and property, rather than contenting themselves with traditional common rights.

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It was arrogance on behalf of the improvers to presume to judge the worth of the land on their own terms.

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The opponents of enclosure recognised that the improvers’ confidence that private wealth creation would automatically produce public benefits was misplaced and failed to take into account the creation of a class of landless labourers dependent on wages.

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Moore questioned the virtue of improvement and improvers. It was not enough to improve for the sake of it: Landownership involved a degree of social responsibility

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he most effective method of poor relief was to employ the labour of ‘many thousands of idle hands’ in cultivating the waste.

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Collective cultivation of the waste would give the poor the advantages of large-scale agricultural methods,

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Native Americans became aggressors in a just war because they could not or would not develop the land.

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later theorists adopted the terms of the debate without registering the displacement of a civilisation.

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