#enclosure movement

[racefortheironthrone]

Any views on the Highland Clearances?

Oh wow, we're really getting into the classics, aren't we?

For the uninitiated, the "Highland Clearances" were a series of large-scale evictions carried out between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries, where rural tenant farmers were evicted from traditional semi-feudal tenancies, in order to allow their landlords to enclose the formerly open fields and replace marginal cereal crop agriculture with more profitable sheep grazing. This particular change evoked the enclosure movement of Tudor times, another time when "sheep ate men."

As for my own views, I see it as part of a monstrous social crime that saw the dispossession and impoverishment of tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, the destruction of an entire way of life at the hands of those entrusted with safekeeping that way of life (many of the landlords involved were the traditional chieftains of the highland clans, who were supposedly bound by kinship to their tenants).

It was also the logic of industrial capitalism at work: farmers were pushed into the cities to become factory workers, cereal crops were replaced by wool production, such that the factory workers were often spinning into cloth the very wool from the sheep that had replaced them in the fields, and feudal lords started to act like profit-maximizing rentier capitalists.

[bravecrab]

When talking about anarchism/socialism, there's often the argument "but food costs money?", and therefore we can't give it to those who need it but haven't earned the money to be worthy of it.

In the grand scheme of things, things do not cost money, they cost labour. Everything we have every created came from the earth.

I want to illustrate this by talking about Minecraft. There isn't really shops in Minecraft (sure you can trade with the villagers, but who really does that), and you're expected to extract your own resources, cut down your trees, plant your own wheat, etc. And when you play with friends, you can just give them stuff, you can barter with each other, no currency.

The difference you have between Minecraft and the real world is access.

You share the world equally, and if you put in the labour, you can get all the resources you need. No private land, no private property.

If you really want to keep your resources from other players, you can resort to violence, or build strong defenses. In game though, the almost limitless resources and access to those resources means that it doesn't really affect other players.

In real life, even in the west where all the ill-gotten gains of colonialism rest, unless you are of a certain class, you don't have access to the fruits of the land, you don't have access to the means of production. We can only pay for access to limited goods.

We're expected to buy seeds if we want to grow plants, even though, for example, you could pluck an apple from a tree, keep the seeds and grow a new tree. But where? Owning property is getting less and less likely, and one with a garden, even less. In the park? Maybe, but if we all start planting food at the park, state violence will step in soon enough to protect private interests.

We need to break the enclosure, and purge the world of the idea of private property, if we ever want to be free. If we ever want a world of plenty, we have to stop those who created the enclosure from creating false scarcity.

[peacemore-springs]

Enclosure Movement

Quite an interesting read, if you like directing thought towards present day ownership and what befalls those lacking a communal place to grow fruit for selling down market.

Q) What happened to communal land?

Quick answer: Communal land in the UK - known as the commons - was gradually taken out of shared use through the Enclosure movement (c. 1450–1914). Over 5,200 parliamentary Enclosure Acts privatized about 28,000 km² of land, stripping villagers of traditional rights to graze animals, gather wood, or farm strips. This transformed land into private property, fueling the Agricultural Revolution but also causing rural displacement and loss of communal livelihoods.

🌿 What Communal Land Was

Common land: Areas where villagers had rights of pasture, wood-gathering (estovers), or pannage (feeding pigs on acorns).

Waste land: Marginal land (rocky edges, riverbanks) often used informally by landless peasants.

Open-field system: Strips of arable land shared among villagers, overseen by manorial courts, with collective crop rotation.

📜 What Happened

Informal enclosure (1450–1600): Local agreements consolidated strips into larger holdings, often fenced or hedged.

Parliamentary enclosure (1604–1914): Over 5,200 Acts legally extinguished common rights, redistributing land to landlords and wealthier tenants.

Compensation: In theory, tenants were compensated, but in practice many smallholders lost access.

Agricultural Revolution: Enclosure allowed new farming techniques, higher yields, and profit-driven agriculture.

Displacement: Many rural poor were forced into wage labor or migration to towns, fueling urbanization and the Industrial Revolution.

⚖️ Consequences

Loss of rights: Villagers could no longer graze animals, collect fuel, or farm strips.

Land concentration: By the early 19th century, half of England’s land was controlled by a small elite.

Social conflict: Enclosure was bitterly contested; pamphlets and riots reflected the dispossession of the poor.

Legacy today: Some commons survive (e.g., Hampstead Heath, New Forest), but most communal land became private estates.

🔔 Why It Matters

Enclosure reshaped Britain’s landscape and economy. It created modern property rights and agricultural efficiency, but also erased communal autonomy and deepened inequality. The echoes of this transformation still resonate in debates about land ownership, access, and ecological stewardship.

[bravecrab]

So I've been watching some videos about the Enclosure Movement in England and the Highland/Lowland Clearances of Scotland, where the landlords took over the common lands, kicked the farmers out and replaced them with more profitable sheep, and this lead to a lot of people moving out of the country, furthering colonization in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with the latter two also having sheep farming as a way of claiming native land.

It also made me wonder about the common Sheep Shagger joke. It's a common insult thrown at Australians, New Zealanders, Some Scottish, and the Welsh, and I have heard it explained simply as the rural folk have more sheep than women so they probably fuck sheep. But I wonder if it started as an insult by those forced off their lands in favour of the sheep industry. "You care more about sheep than people, you probably fuck them".

Don't really have any evidence to back it up, but it's a hypothosis.

[rhianna]

Farmland Speculation

This is accompanied by land speculation and rack-renting, which is intensified by the land-hunger which causes successful capitalists,[22] who have made money in trade, to buy up land as a profitable investment for their savings, and by the sale of corporate property which took place on the dissolution[23] of the monasteries and the confiscation of part of the gild estates. The consequence is, first, that there is a scarcity of agricultural produce and a rise[24] in prices, which is partly (it is supposed) attributable to the operations of the great graziers who control the supplies of wool, grain, and dairy produce, and secondly and more important that the small cultivator suffers in three ways. Agricultural employment is lessened. Small holdings are thrown[25] together and are managed by large capitalists, with the result that he is driven off the land, either by direct eviction, or by a rise in rents and fines, or by mere intimidation. At the same time the commonable[26] area, consisting of the common waste, meadow, and pasture of the manor is diminished, with the result that the tenants who are not evicted suffer through loss of the facilities which they had previously had for grazing beasts without payment. There is, in consequence, a drift into the towns and a general lowering in the standard of rural life, due to the decay of the class which formerly sent recruits to the learned professions, which was an important counterpoise to the power of the great landed proprietors, and which was the backbone of the military forces of the country.[27] 

Source:    The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century by R. H. Tawneyhttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40336

[thememesofpoliticaleconomy-blog]

[thememesofpoliticaleconomy-blog]

[robtrjf-blog]

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