Enclosures: Paths to perdition

Enclosure refers to the transformation of collectively governed resources — land, labour, knowledge, energy, or ecological capacity — into alienable property controlled by a narrow set of actors. It entails legal, political, and coercive mechanisms that restrict access, commodify use, and concentrate wealth and power.¹ It is the essence of what is now known as neo-liberal economics.

Enclosure is not a neutral process. It is the deliberate act by powerful individuals to turn what belongs to everyone — land, labour, water, knowledge, and even ecological capacity — into private property under their control.¹ It was not civilisational necessity; it was human greed, enforced through law, violence, and coercion. This process was never merely a technical response to alleged public-sector “inefficiency.” Instead, enclosure has historically been a political project — one that systematically reallocated communal resources into the control of elites. The rhetorical claim that markets are efficient and public systems are inherently inefficient serves this project by legitimising dispossession in the language of productivity and progress.

Long before capitalist modernity, human societies governed material and social life through commons-based systems that were durable, rule-bound, and relational. In early medieval England, Saxon village councils administered communal fields, floodplain pastures, woodlands, and waterworks through customary law and collective enforcement.² In the Alpine regions of northern Italy and Switzerland, cooperative management of pastures and irrigation sustained mountain communities over generations.³ Indigenous societies in North America — such as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy — regulated hunting territories, fisheries, and forests through complex protocols that balanced use with regeneration.⁴ Across sub-Saharan Africa, groups like the Tiv and Maasai organised grazing, water access, and seasonal migrations through oral jurisprudence and community councils. In Southeast Asia, the Ifugao rice terraces of the Philippines and the subak irrigation networks of Bali combined ritual practice with ecological knowledge to govern water and labour collectively, long predating colonial intervention.⁵

These arrangements were not benign or egalitarian in any utopian sense, but they were functional governance systems capable of managing scarcity, coordinating risk, and reproducing social and ecological life. Survival depended on social norms of mutual obligation rather than abstract market competition. This configuration is what scholars refer to as a moral economy: economic life constrained by shared expectations of fairness, subsistence security, and collective responsibility.⁶

The rise of elites did not occur because commons-based governance “failed.” It occurred because it worked, constraining unmediated accumulation and embedding resources within social relations. Enclosure emerged when early barons, church estates, and military elites succeeded in exempting themselves from reciprocal obligations, using newly centralised legal and military powers to redefine access rights. Law, religion, and violence were not external to economy; they were instruments in transforming communal systems into privately controlled domains.⁷

The Norman Conquest of England (1066) marks one of the earliest, well‑documented shifts in this direction. Pre‑Conquest Anglo-Saxon England featured village courts and customary tenure systems that regulated shared access to land and forest.⁸ Norman rule introduced feudal tenure, centralised taxation, and legal mechanisms — such as forest law and manorial courts — that repositioned these commons under Norman control.⁹ Monastic estates and aristocratic landholders were among the first systematic enclosers, fencing off fields and woodlands, codifying private access through charters, and reframing common rights as conditional privileges.¹⁰ Over the early modern period, these practices culminated in Parliamentary Enclosure Acts that formalised wide‑scale privatization of open fields and commons.

The British Isles demonstrate how enclosure took different but related forms across regions. In England, the consolidation of open fields into hedged holdings by the 18th and early 19th centuries displaced smallholders and eroded customary rights. Scotland experienced the Highland Clearances, in which landlord-driven eviction and “improvement” rhetoric dismantled clan-based commons, forcing mass migration to industrial cities or overseas.¹¹ In Wales, upland grazing commons and shared pastures were enclosed under estate management, disrupting village subsistence.¹² Ireland represents perhaps the starkest example: centuries of plantation policy, absentee landlordism, and legal expropriation eroded centuries-old communal tenures. The Great Famine (1845–1852) starkly illustrated the prioritisation of property rights over survival, as enclosed English grain exports continued amidst mass starvation of Irish people.¹³

These patterns were exported globally through European conquest and colonialism. In the Americas, Indigenous confederacies and agricultural states were dismantled; land was seized and repurposed for plantation economies dependent on coerced labour.¹⁴ In the Caribbean and American South, land enclosure went hand‑in‑hand with the transatlantic slave trade, supplying enslaved Africans to plantation regimes that generated enormous surplus for European markets.¹⁵ Australia’s Aboriginal lands were declared terra nullius; in New Zealand, the Treaty of Waitangi facilitated large‑scale land transfers from Māori to settlers; and in Africa and Southeast Asia, pastoral and agrarian commons were overlaid with colonial property regimes tied to export markets.¹⁶ These transformations were justified through narratives of civilisation, productivity, or waste — but in substance they were systematic dispossession.

Where enclosure typically separates people from land or resources, slavery enclosed the human being itself — body, labour, and future rendered as property. From the 16th century onward, European and later American wealth was built less on innovation than on the systematic appropriation of labour and land. Enslaved labour on sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations supplied the capital for industrial expansion, shipping networks,  personal fortunes and financial sectors in Europe and North America.¹⁷ Far from a marginal anomaly, slavery was a foundational mechanism in early capitalist accumulation, steeped in brutality and the torture of fellow human beings, for profit.

When formal slavery became politically untenable, enclosure did not disappear; it adapted. Colonial regimes reorganised land, labour, and nature on a planetary scale: forests became timber reserves, rivers transport corridors, soils monocultural plantations, and mineral deposits colonial assets.¹⁸ In the contemporary era, fossil fuel extraction marks a decisive escalation of these dynamics. Fossil carbon stored over geological time was captured, commodified, and combusted in the span of a century, producing unprecedented surplus while externalising ecological costs across space and time.¹⁹ States underwrite exploration risk, subsidise production, and guarantee corporate returns, while local populations often endure environmental degradation, loss of livelihoods, and displacement.²⁰

In this process, the biosphere itself has become enclosed. Carbon sinks, water cycles, and atmospheric capacity — once understood as shared ecological commons — are treated as unpriced inputs for corporate profit. This enclosure has not emerged from market efficiency; it depends on the political backing of neo-liberal state institutions and legal frameworks that disentangle economic value from social and ecological cost.

Neoliberalism intensifies these tendencies rather than reversing them. Public goods and services — water, energy, transport, health — have been subject to privatisation or contractual outsourcing. Rail franchises in the UK, built with infrastructure subsidised by public funds, pay dividends to private shareholders while long‑term fiscal liabilities often remain socialised.²¹ Scotland’s publicly owned water utilities demonstrate that access and, in many cases, investment outcomes can be comparable or superior without private profit extraction.²² Digital platforms monetise data generated collectively on infrastructures rooted in public research, turning shared knowledge into corporate surplus.

Empirical research finds that privatisation rarely produces consistent or universal efficiency gains; outcomes depend heavily on governance, regulation, and institutional design.²³ Energy markets in the US and Europe show that consumer prices can rise after privatisation, while underinvestment in grid resilience and renewable integration is offset by the reliance on public subsidies and risk guarantees.²⁴ Any apparent productivity gains are frequently overwhelmed by contractual complexity and the socialisation of risk.

Responses to enclosure have also shaped history. Labour unions, welfare states, and public services emerged as defensive institutions, institutionalising fragments of earlier moral economies within hostile systems, collectivising bargaining, regulating access to work, and enforcing social norms.²⁵ Yet they remain constrained, continually undermined by the same forces that drive enclosure.

Civilisation now confronts the terminal form of enclosure. What was once land and labour has expanded to ecosystems, knowledge systems, climate stability, and the very conditions of habitable life. The question is no longer whether public or private systems are more efficient; it is whether the foundational conditions that sustain life are to be collectively governed or appropriated for private extraction.

History suggests that enclosure is interrupted not by technical fixes or managerial reforms, but by collective refusal at scale — through strikes, mass mobilisation, and coordinated non‑cooperation. If enclosure is global, resistance must also be global; if dispossession is systemic, responses cannot be individualised.

Today, the impacts of mass enclosure are visible everywhere: in aristocratic estates still controlling land titles; in multinational corporations dominating energy, food, and data markets; in tax systems that favour capital over labour; and in legal regimes that protect private property above all else. These privileges are built on systemic dispossession — of commons, of labour, of technologies, of ecosystems — across continents and centuries. Efficiency arguments, technicalism, or incremental reform will not dismantle this structural capture.

The future of civilisation depends on whether populations reassert the older, dangerous principle that the conditions of life should not belong to elites alone. Whether through organised labour, ecological alliances, Indigenous sovereignty, or new forms of democratic governance, the possibility of reclaiming shared governance remains open — but it will not be granted. It must be taken.

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Footnotes

1. Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation. Beacon Press; Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford University Press.

2. Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press.

3. Fleming, Robin. 1991. Kings and Lords in Conquest England. Cambridge University Press.

4. Bartlett, Robert. 2000. England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225. Oxford University Press.

5. Mann, Charles. 2005. 1491. Vintage.

6. Thompson, E.P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage.

7. Banner, Stuart. 2005. Possession and Conquest: The Legal History of the Territorial Frontier. Cambridge University Press.

8. Fleming, Robin. 1991. Kings and Lords in Conquest England.

9. Bartlett, Robert. 2000. England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings.

10. Ibid.

11. Devine, T.M. 2018. The Scottish Clearances. Penguin.

12. Jenkins, Geraint H. 1992. The Foundations of Modern Wales. Oxford University Press.

13. Mokyr, Joel. 1983. Why Ireland Starved. Routledge; Ó Gráda, Cormac. 1999. Black ’47 and Beyond. Princeton University Press.

14. Mann, Charles. 2005. 1491.

15. Williams, Eric. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. University of North Carolina Press.

16. Scott, James C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed. Yale University Press.

17. Baptist, Edward E. 2014. The Half Has Never Been Told. Basic Books.

18. Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford University Press; Bridge, Gavin, et al. 2013. “The Third Carbon Age.” Environment and Planning A 45(8): 1905–1927.

19. Newell, Peter & Daniel Peterson. 2019. “The Political Economy of the Carbon Transition.” Review of International Political Economy 26(4): 699–728.

20. Bebbington, Anthony, et al. 2018. “Resource Extraction and Infrastructure Threaten Forest Cover and Community Rights.” PNAS 115(52): 13164–13173.

21. Estache, Antonio, Stephane Perelman & Luis Trujillo. 2005. “Infrastructure Performance and Reform.” Policy and Society 27(3): 221–248.

22. Hall, David & Emanuele Lobina. 2006. “Water Privatisation and Restructuring in England and Wales.” International Journal of Water 2(1): 47–72.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Thompson, E.P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class.