Over the course of a few hundred years, much of Britain's land has been privatized — that is to say taken out of some form of collective ownership and management and handed over to individuals.
Currently, in our "property-owning democracy", nearly half the country is owned by 40, land millionaires, or 0. There are many factors that have led to such extreme levels of land concentration, but the most blatant and the most contentious has been enclosure — the subdivision and fencing of common land into individual plots which were allocated to those people deemed to have held rights to the land enclosed.
For over years, pamphleteers, politicians and historians have argued about enclosure, those in favour including the beneficiaries insisting that it was necessary for economic development or "improvement", and those against including the dispossessed claiming that it deprived the poor of their livelihoods and led to rural depopulation.
Reams of evidence derived from manorial rolls, tax returns, field orders and so on have been painstakingly unearthed to support either side. The overgrazing of English common land has been held up as the archetypal example of the "tragedy of the commons" — the fatal deficiency that a neoliberal intelligentsia holds to be inherent in all forms of common property. Attitudes towards enclosures in the past were always ideologically charged, but now any stance taken towards them betrays a parallel approach to the crucial issues of our time: the management of global commons and the conflict between the global and the local, between development and diversity.
Those of us who have not spent a lifetime studying agricultural history should beware of leaping to convenient conclusions about the past, for nothing is quite what it seems.
