Enclosure Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The concept of enclosure refers to the conversion of communal or commonly held public lands into private ownership. It is used most often to refer to the vast changes in land tenure in the English landscape between the 15th and 19th centuries, when over 6.8 million acres-21 percent of the English land area-were “enclosed.” Enclosure involved the reorganization of both public and private open field and meadow land properties, and also the reclamation of unused commons, moors, heaths, and other lands designated as wastes. Open fields and scattered cultivation plots were considered to be inefficient, and communal management strategies were thought to inhibit innovation. Other motivations for field enclosure included securing the right of way for roads and additional building lands for townships, establishing mineral rights, and stemming soil fertility decline due to overuse of common open fields. Finally, larger farm units made for easier administration and collection of rents.

Enclosure in England was both a public and a private process. Acts of Parliament to enclose public lands were initiated in 1604, but were mainly legislated between 1760 and 1830. Parliamentary acts dominated after 1750, with more than 5,000 acts of enclosure in the subsequent century. “General enclosures acts” were implemented upon petition from a landlord or following a formal agreement signed by parties including, for example, a landowner and communal land users. In cases of division of public or common lands held by a township, commissioners were employed to assess the claims of the various users and assign rents. As a private process, individual users of manor properties negotiated to establish leaseholds, often allowing the manor owner to charge increased rents.

Transformation of Agriculture

Despite popular protest and a series of rebellions by the traditional users of the common lands, the completion of the enclosure acts in England affected more than just changes in land tenure. It resulted in the transformation of traditional models of agriculture based on open fields and communal grazing areas without fixed boundaries into small, private holdings separated by physical barriers including ditches, fences, and hedges.

The social and economic results of English parliamentary enclosure included the dispossession of small farmers and landless laborers, contributing to what Karl Marx and others have referred to as the creation of the English working class, which played a major part in driving the Industrial Revolution. The loss of open fields led to a decline in access to grazing for small husbandry and reduced access to nonwage sources of subsistence including the gathering of fuel wood, fruits, herbs, and other wild resources and reduced ability to glean the remains of harvest from common fields. According to one estimate, enclosure negatively affected not only those entirely dependent on the open field structure for economic survival, but up to 60 percent of families already working for a wage by the end of the 17th century.

The concept of enclosure has been used in critiques of contemporary land and natural resource conservation policy in reference to the creation of conservation areas through the exclusion of traditional users. The theory of the Tragedy of the Commons and the assertion that rural productivity and the environment are threatened by the absence of property rights, suggest that erecting formal property boundaries to eliminate open-access to forests, rangelands, and other resources will improve both conservation and economic outcomes.

Conservation and development initiatives based on these ideas have produced “conservation refugees” in what has been referred to as greenlining or ecological expropriation as the rights to traditional subsistence areas are restructured to limit use by certain populations. The estimated displacement of local peoples by nature reserves and national protected areas in Africa, for example, numbers in the millions. The lack of political leverage by the affected populations to contest the enclosure of their traditional lands has contributed to an increase in poverty with little documented improvement in conservation outcomes, in addition to the added costs of resettlement and park monitoring. In addition, common property research has shown that many common land use areas are managed by a well-developed system of community rules and regulations.

Bibliography:

Chatty and M. Colchester, eds., Conservation and Mobile Indigenous Peoples: Displacement, Forced Settlement, and Sustainable Development (Berghahn Books, 2002);
Charles Geisler and Ragendra De Sousa, “From Refuge to Refugee: The African C” Public Administration and Development (v. 21, 2001);
Jane Humphries, “Enclosures, Common Rights and Women: The Proletarianization of Families in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries” Journal of Economic History (March 1990);
E. Mingay, Enclosure and the Small Farmer in the Age of the Industrial Revolution (Macmillan, 1968);
Michael Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure: Its Historical Geography and Economic History (Archon Books, 1980);
Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England 1450-1850 (MacMillan Press, 1977).