Enclosure
The conversion of shared common land into private property — a historical process that remade English agriculture between the 15th and 19th centuries, and a structural logic that continues to operate wherever common resources become private ones.
The Idea
Before enclosure, English villages organized their agricultural life around a set of common rights. The open fields were worked in strips by different households, but the fallow and the waste were commons — available to all village members for grazing, gleaning, fuel, and foraging. The commons weren’t just a resource; they were a social world with customary obligations, seasonal rhythms, and forms of governance that preceded written law by centuries.
Enclosure ended that. Over several centuries, English common land was enclosed by agreement, landlord fiat, and parliamentary act (more than 5,000 acts between 1604 and 1914, covering some 6.8 million acres) — hedged, fenced, and converted to private pasture or improved arable. The people who had sustained their households through common rights were dispossessed. Some moved to cities. Others became the rural poor.
The economic argument was productivity: enclosed land is more efficiently managed than commons. This was partly true and mostly irrelevant to the displaced. What was lost wasn’t just calories or income but an entire form of life — the customary knowledge, the collective management, the social interdependence that the commons had organized.
E.P. Thompson and the Moral Dimension
The historian E.P. Thompson showed that the resistance to enclosure wasn’t simply economic grievance. It was moral. Common rights weren’t just resource claims; they were inscribed in a sense of what social life was supposed to look like. When landlords enclosed the commons, they weren’t just changing property arrangements — they were breaking a moral order.
Thompson’s concept of the moral-economy comes from studying eighteenth-century food riots, a close cousin of enclosure resistance: the conviction that market behavior must conform to social norms, that there are things which simply cannot be sold, that price gouging during famine is not just economically suboptimal but wrong. The moral dimension of enclosure resistance is why it’s not accurately described as proto-socialist agitation. It was conservative — trying to preserve an existing social world against disruption.
The Logic Persists
Enclosure isn’t just history. The same structural logic reappears whenever shared resources are converted to private property:
- Intellectual commons — software patents, copyright extension, paywall enclosure of academic research
- Genetic commons — the enclosure of traditional seed varieties through patents and variety protection laws
- Data enclosure — the capture of collective social behavior as proprietary datasets
- Urban commons — the conversion of public space, municipal services, and civic infrastructure to private operation
The activists and theorists who use “enclosure” as a category (Yochai Benkler, Vandana Shiva, Richard Stallman) are arguing that the logic is the same: what was available to all becomes available to few, and the loss isn’t just to the dispossessed but to the social fabric that the commons organized.
The Tension
Romanticizing pre-enclosure commons is easy and usually wrong. The actual commons were often sites of conflict, inequality between households, and ecological overuse. Ostrom’s work on commons governance shows they can be managed well — but that management required real institutions, real enforcement, and real exclusions of outsiders. The commons was never the egalitarian idyll it sometimes appears to be in enclosure nostalgia.
What enclosure destroyed wasn’t perfection but possibility — the possibility of organizing land use around collective rights rather than individual property. Whether that possibility can be recovered or whether land trusts and commons-based management are adequate replacements is an open question.
Connections
- commons — what enclosure displaced
- moral-economy — the sense of justice that enclosure violated
- e-p-thompson — historian of enclosure and popular resistance
- Elinor Ostrom — the commons can be governed, but requires institutions
- community-land-trust — one structural response to enclosure logic
- land-trust — the legal form that locks land out of the private market
- Yochai Benkler — digital commons and enclosure
- Vandana Shiva — enclosure of genetic and agricultural commons
Further Reading
- Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
- Linebaugh, Peter. The Magna Carta Manifesto (2008)
- Neeson, J.M. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (1993)
The hedge that divided common land from private is still running through the landscape, mostly invisible now.