Enclosure

From Geography

In historical geograpy, enclosure refers to the extinction of ‘common rights’ and the replacement of open or common fields, pastures and meadows with ‘enclosed’ fields free of such rights. Across large swathes of medieval and early modern Europe, much agricultural land was common land that was subject to various forms of use by all individuals holding ‘common-rights’ (De Moor, Shaw-Taylor and Warde, 2002). These included rights to graze animals on common pasture and sometimes the right to gather fuel; rights over common fields, where individual cultivators might own a large number of scattered strips of arable land that alternated seasonally between private cultivation of strips and communal grazing by those with common rights; and rights over common woodlands. Such common rights were not available to everyone, and were regulated by institutions such as manor or village courts. Enclosure replaced common land with fully private land that in some regions physically ‘enclosed’ by a hedge, wall or ditch – within its boundaries, the owner or tenant normally has exclusive rights to use that land.

While enclosure has been subject to longstanding historical scrutiniy, more recent work has also begun to reinterpret the concept of enclosure as a means of exploring the contemporary forms and processes of neo-liberalism. Human geographers have seized upon enclosure as an ongoing feature of capital accumulation. Whereas traditional historical accounts of enclosure emphasized its relationship to ‘the commons’, recent work has proposed a more complex spatial formation operating across a number of scales, sites and practices, from special economic zones to genetic modification and biometrics. Three major axes of investigation have been identified (Vasudevan, McFarlane and Jeffrey, 2008). The first focuses on the role of enclosure as a technology of contemporary neo-liberalism. Narratives of enclosure help illuminate the reconfiguration of political sovereignties, modes of subjectification and neo-liberal economic norms through a variety of territories and networks. The second explores the role of law as a key instrument through wich both old and new forms of enckosure are legitimatized, regulated and policed. The third addresses the significance of enclosure as a key dimension of our colonial present. While studies of colonialism underline the importantance of land tenure as a precondition for particular forms of displacement, dispossesion and discipline, contemporary instances of imperial enclosure have also mutated into new forms of the enclave capitalism that has accompanied the securitization of global mineral extraction. Such an expansive re-conceptualization of enclosure has highlighted not only a complex set of logics of spatial inclusion and exclusion, but increasingly urgent forms of resistance that centre on a messy and highly conflicted reclaiming of the ‘commons’.

By Mike van der Linden and Paul Cuijpers

Johnston, R., Gregory, D. Pratt, G. & Watts, M. (2000) The Dictionary of Human Geography, 4th edition. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing