Enclosure and colonialism
In this piece I want to connect some of the dots between how land has come to be owned in England, colonialism and the idea of racial capitalism. It is broad bush, covering many hundreds of years and seeks to draw connections between historical processes rather than go into detail and depth on any particular issue. There will be so much that is not covered here or that is mentioned all too briefly. Please share what parts of this story you want to know more about. And what else!
The Norman Conquest, Enclosure and Internal Colonisation
Many histories of land ownership in England start with the Norman Conquest and the creation of a land system which still holds to some degree to this day. The first written record of land ownership can be found in the Doomsday Book of 1086. From this point, the Norman aristocracy owned 50% of the land, with a strict social hierarchy in operation with the king at the top to the landless serfs at the bottom.
Under this system, ‘common’ land in England fell under the control of the lord who owned the land and was worked by tenant farmers who had certain rights - for example to graze animals on the common, to cut peat for fuel or to gather wood from the forests, and to fish in the rivers. These were rights to subsistence, rights to live on what could be gleaned from the land.
The Normans also invaded Wales and had conquered most of southern Wales by 1094. An Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland took place later in 1169 marking the beginning of more than 800 years of English, then British conquest and colonialism. Northern Wales and Scotland remained independent of Norman settlement during this period, and it would be in later periods that they would come under English / British rule.
Wales would be incorporated with England under the rule of Henry VIII. This king also pursued and aggressive campaign to assert British dominance in Ireland. It wasn’t until 1707 that Scotland and England combined to become the Kingdom of Great Britain. These processes of control and domination by England over Wales, Scotland and Ireland in some ways both mirrored and vastly escalated the micro processes of enclosure that were also happening over the same time period.
From as early as the 12th century, landowners in England began to enclose the land, putting up hedges and fences. Enclosure came with waves of changes in agriculture, seeking more efficient farming techniques to raise higher profits. Alongside deepening philosophical and political beliefs in private property. Enclosure intensified during the Tudor era with more and more people evicted from the land.
More formal processes of Parliamentary enclosure through the passing of Acts of Parliament began in 1604 and intensified throughout the 18th century. Between 1604 and 1914 there were 5200 enclosure bills, enclosing 6,800,000 acres of land or one fifth the total area of England.
Alongside these enclosure bills, Parliament also made property rights absolute and the traditional practices of living from the land became theft, gleaning became trespass and fishing became poaching. People were separated from the land by law unless they owned the land in England. Eula Bliss describes these processes in the New Yorker article: The Theft of the Commons
Colonialism of land and peoples further afield
From internal colonisation projects of enclosure across and within the British Isles through projects of land grabbing and cultural suppression, colonial projects further afield took place. Waves of colonisation took place over centuries until the British Empire covered 23% of the Earth’s land mass by 1920 - land acquired through violence, domination and oppression.
In her book, Green Unpleasant Land, Corinne Fowler has observed, the period of intensifying enclosure corresponded with the time of colonialism and the establishment of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade:
‘Commodifying the land and commodifying people went hand in hand’.
The enslavement and transportations of millions of people from the African continent, and the participation in the brutal systems of plantation slavery were deeply entangled in the colonial projects of the British empire. As well as the development of technologies of racism that enabled the dehumanisation of peoples across the world.
The creation of whiteness as a concept by the courts and law makers of Virgnia and Maryland, as Jacqueline Battalora outlines, sought to justify and legitimise the creation of hierarchies of people based on their skin colour. And through the creation of hierarchies, dehumanisation and the extracted labour it enabled ensued.
The wealth generated through colonialism and slavery came back to England to enable the purchase of more land and more property. In his Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us, Nick Hayes illustrates how wealth generated through colonialism in the Caribbean and in India part-funded the 18th century land grabs in England.
In his treatise, Capitalism and Slavery, written in 1944, Eric Williams traces how the money from plantation slavery came to shape the landscape in England from country houses to gardens, industry to infrastructural development. Even post abolition in 1933, cotton produced by enslaved people on plantations in what had become the USA continued to fuel the industrial revolution through the exploitation of the working classes in the mills and factories of England.
And money from compensation given to the former owners of enslaved people in the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1834, continued to be paid off until 2015. The work done by the Legacies of British Slave Ownership project, led by Catherine Hall, was able to bring slavery and its consequences back to English shores, tracing wealth from compensation back onto the maps of England.
The money used to buy land, to enclose land, and extend the private property of landowners correlated directly to the pursuit of power. The right to vote, the right to a seat in Parliament was directly linked to landownership until the Representation of the People Act 1928 when all adults over 18 can vote no matter their property status.
Until then, these landowners had the power to shape law and policy to protect their own interests. To accumulate more land, to continue profit making activities that enabled them to accumulate more land, to enable colonialism and slavery to continue for so long.
It is important to name that in many ways these processes are still ongoing - they have not closed. Neo-colonialism through the control of resources and territories continue, often by corporations as well as nation-states and wealthy individuals, and the legacies of the systems of slavery and colonialism today still shape who has access to material wealth and who does not. As well as who has access to land and who does not. And the even the well-being of the land itself which has been extracted from and decimated in so many places.
Connecting the dots
Making these connections between the histories of enclosure, the colonisation of Ireland and Wales and Scotland by England and colonial projects of Britain across the globe that has caused so much devastation draws attention to a similar process that has happened across time and space.
The pursuit of profit and power through the ownership of land and the exploitation of peoples has happened across time and space. The dispossession of people from the land, the claiming ‘this is mine’, the creation of hierarchies and separation, and the use of violence to suppress resistance, are all technologies that have been used to gain and hold power by some over the many.
This is not to say that the experiences of those who experienced enclosure and those who experienced colonisation are the same. But in drawing connections between these processes which, at the root, seem to have a similar orientation / motivation - to take land, to make profit, to control what happens on that land and what the people who live and work with it may or may not do and to do so with violence - feels significant.
And for two reasons. First, in that it has the potential to draw solidarity across struggles for land justice in England with land justice struggles across the world because there is something of a shared experience of being forced away from the land/having land taken from you. And secondly, because of the interconnected histories of England’s land system with colonisation across the world this has implications for what land justice in movements based in the belly of the beast need to tend to.
There has been dispossession here on these lands, exploitation and a severing of connection with place, with earth, with community. And from this place has come the dispossession and exploitation of lands and peoples across the globe. Both and. And we need to grapple with all these histories.
