As far as Britain is concerned I recommend Kemp's book on the industrial revolution.

The British industrial revolution relied on huge supplies of labour displaced from the 'enclosure' of previously common lands by the landed aristocracy.  'Common' lands had previously been widely used by both landless labourers and the few peasants that Britain still had in the 18th Century to rear cattle and therefore survive.  When the artistocrats simply decided that this land could be 'enclosed' so that only they could use it, they created poverty and at the same time a new and quite large social group that could be used in the new factories.  It was cheap labour because it was desperate.

Sir Richard

I am extremely thankful to you for your valued reference as well your comments. The 'enclosures', as I am told were serving dual purposes. At the one hand, by enclosing the manorial and common lands, the lords were creating exclusive property rights in land and, on the other, as you have beautifully explained, they were creating 'free' labour to the then-emerging financial and industrial capitalism.

Sir, I am interested in seeing the similarities between the historical enclosures and the now going on land transfers to the corporations and big business conglomerates both by private transactions and by the exercise of the eminent domain of land acquisition and displacement, by the developing nations.

I, very humbly, anticipate your valuable guidance.

With best regards

Israr

Israr you are very welcome.

One similarity between the two situations--Britain in the 18-19 Centuries and developing countries today lies in the use of power over those with (a)little or no legal documentation to support their claims to land and (b) even when they have that legal documentation, an inability to access and use legal systems to enforce that right.

There are many other similarities as well, but that is a very long story!

Best wishes

Richard

Yes Sir,

That is a very long story. I want to engage myself with, at least, a few turns of that story!

With kind regards

Israr

Dear Israr,

In considering this question of enclosure, it has long been my hypothesis that the 'development potential' of a country as viewed by third parties and also their assessment of the development that has been achieved are both a function of the degree to which production in a country can be measured in terms of the data produced by double-entry bookkeeping and the drawing up of company accounts.  

The conventions employed by this 'institution of measurement' presume that certain other 'institutions' of a social nature permeate the whole of the economy under consideration.  These institutions are chiefly those of private property of everything which is of economic significance and the legal and judicial framework by which rights of ownership are both established and defended.  Subsidiary, therefore, to this framework by which private property and hence accounting and economic measurement can exist is the requirement for institutions of enforcement at a practical level.  These are the police force in the case of laws with domestic jurisdiction and the military in the case of those situations where legal jurisdiction can only be enforced as the de facto consequences of a successful military action or threat of action against parties that are beyond one's domestic jurisdiction.

This leads to the phenomenon by which all social capital that has been developed as a consequence of non-accounted forms of economic production and exchange can, and are, viewed by many as being worthless, of no value and therefore can be ignored and if that is so then they can be disregarded entirely which is to say that they can therefore be treated as non-existent to all intents and purposes.

That being so, in the mind's of people acting rationally and with self-interest, the achievement of which is measured in terms of ownership of those private possessions out of which assured income streams might be generated, it is therefore sensible for 'the country' (in advancing its trading position i.e. its market powers vis a vis those of other countries) as well as being sensible for the self-interested and patriotic individual to 'better' utilise any limited domestic resources that can be shown to be not contributing as well as they might in those terms which are measurable. 

The final enclosures in Great Britain, as a result of the Land Enclosure Act of 1890, was a consequence, at least in part, of the accepted validity of this argument. 

In practice the same landowners who had profited from their investments in the Late Georgian and Victorian industrialisation, and who had profited from the utilisation by these new industries of the minerals found upon their own lands, had also profited from the massive markets for their agricultural produce in the rapidly growing cities sprouting up close by and upon their lands.   Without cheap food they could not sustain cheap labour and without cheap labour they could not sustain their industrial investments and profits.  The 1890 enclosures were thus aimed at boosting to the maximum the wealth of the existing landed and industrial aristocracy, which in most instances were and still are one and the same group of people.  In the process they could also be seen as being patriotic.

With these powerful arguments, in their view and that of the 'Zeitgeist', they found it easy to convince themselves of the rectitude of this legislation when they themselves considered its desirability in their roles, and that of their 'agents', as 'elected' Members of Parliament and as titular Lords of the land.

The previous two major periods of enclosures took place in the Medieval and Renaissance times, each several hundred years apart and as a result of different specific economic pressures but through what may, if one wished, be also characterised as the actions of mere men acting with rationality and legitimate self-interest.

In all three periods those who suffered the practical consequences in terms of their livelihoods and often with their lives were 'of no account' and were therefore able to be disregarded.  It should be mentioned here that we are often blinkered, in looking at history, by the familiar institutions of our contemporary experience.  Even in Victorian times it was still common for the elite to identify themselves as constituting the 'British Nation'.  When they went to war with another nation it was a state of war which chiefly existed between elites.  The battles were often, especially in the earlier periods, fought by hired troops and mercenaries and not by patriotic volunteers and conscripts.  Trade and normal life would often continue between countries at war, especially amongst those of 'no account'.  'Ethical behaviour' and rationality in these circumstances cannot be easily judged against contemporary attitudes.  The context is always paramount in making such judgements.

To return for a moment to the Victorian industrialists and landowners...

Their industries were in turn dependent upon the cheap labour which produced the foreign inputs that were also required by those industries since they in turn were required to be cheap. 

These were kept cheap by claiming jurisdiction over the foreign lands from which they came, and over the maritime routes over which the goods travelled.  This jurisdiction was maintained by military means and implemented by the administrative practices and conventions imposed by this 'Pax Britannica', practices which were an extension of those already established domestically.

Like the Romans in earlier times, the British co-opted existing power structures in those foreign lands as their 'agents'.  In this way the foreign elites could profit from supplying cheaply, as a result of cheap and abundant local labour, the imports required by Britain for it to profit.  They could thus afford to buy the manufactured baubles and those technological products useful in maintaining and displaying their elite status relative to their own domestic populations and the power they needed to sustain that position.

Enclosures and other limitations of access to physical resources and the circumscribing of freedoms to practice certain skills all result in a concentration of ownership of the 'rights of ownership' within any population.  For some cases of limitation there may be aspects associated with them which serve a laudable domestic objective... such as in the limitations that limit access to the skills and resources to manufacture nuclear weapons.  But in nearly all cases such limitations have the effect of creating a 'market power' in the hands of those holding title to 'ownership' of the rights to access, use and practise.  In short the market price of the products that can be produced as a result of ownership of those rights will be higher in relation to their costs of production than they might otherwise have been.

In terms of classical and neoclassical economics and their models of economic man and of free markets these rights, stemming from private ownership and when the creation of these rights and their subsequent use are left to the rationality and self-interest of their owners, then constitute a structural abuse of the principles of free markets.  They also abuse the principle that the desired general macro-economic outcomes of policy can rely for their validity upon the combined effects resulting from the independent exercises of rationality and self-interest by myriad individual economic agents.  This is so simply because 'market power' is an 'economic power' and so its consequence is to affect the economic behaviour of others in their labouring and in their exchanging of the products of their labour.  Power is nothing if it is not, ultimately, economic in nature.  It is used to satisfy a desired 'good' by the consumption or production of a desired product.  It is the creation, to a greater or lesser degree within an economic exchange, of the circumstances whereby one party is able to co-opt some or all of the labour services of another.

Enclosures must be viewed therefore as just one aspect of a much greater social phenomenon.  One which I suspect is not confined within our own species, or even within the Simian genus.  But it is this issue of 'power equity' which lies at the heart of  contemporary concerns with inequality, exploitation, sustainability and resilience.

Are these universally valid concepts to be pursued for application to all human individuals?  Or are they, as they have been in almost all human societies of historical record, only validly to be pursued freely by those who can garner sufficient personal powers to pursue these virtues through the institutional and systematic co-option of 'unearned' portions of the production of all others not so fully entitled?  A view widely held by the ancient Greek philosophies at the heart of modern neoclassical economics.

Our present economic arrangements are based upon models, assumptions and so-called axioms (at least by some) which were conceived in a time when this 'right of the elite' was still largely unquestioned (not even by the French Revolution the fruits of which were inherited by the pre-existing bourgeoisie).  

This same philosophical outlook that produced the 1890 Enclosure Act is alive and well in all those countries struggling to achieve the same 'growth data' as has been seen by the already 'developed' nations of the world.  Enclosures of land, for 'better' supposedly more productive use, are demanded now in places such as India for much the same reasons and at the instigation and 'advice' of much the same elements of society as they were in Victorian Britain. And are justified by much the same brand of economic wisdom.  A ';wisdom' that tells those supporting these actions around the planet that they are individually acting 'ethically' because their 'rationality' and 'self-interest' in so doing is consistent with the Victorian ethic upon which the economic model itself was posited.

This is another 'house of cards'.  But the glue holding it together is that of institutional and economic power wielded from within a 'cadestral system' that has itself been built in such a way as to support and maintain it.

De Soto has identified the existence of such a system of institutions to be necessary and sufficient for the development of any underdeveloped country.  His, approximately, sixty-four steps to development have failed, in all but the first implementation I believe, to have the expected result.  This is probably more due to a lack of social cohesion amongst the domestic elites combined with a lack of total dependence amongst the majority of skilled people upon a 'principled cooperation and diligence' towards their administrative, managerial, judicial, legal, artisan and manual roles in these countries.

In short, again, this is to say that labour can only be cheap if it is reliable, diligent and obedient to the completion of the tasks assigned to it.  Inefficiency is expensive to those hoping to see profit from the labours of others.

Africa, historically, had only three countries across the entire continent which had displayed in pre-oil boom eras any degree of 'development' by classical measures.  These were Egypt, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.  In every case productive land had been entirely 'enclosed' before any demands were made upon their people to work in factories.  The enclosures and labour efficiencies it enabled made food more available and populations increased.  When the calls came to the increment of the growing population without agricultural work they had the choice to go and work in factories, and take care of their continued suitability for employment, or to face a future of almost certain starvation or death.  The last British dispossessed peasants had faced the same choices only fifty or sixty years earlier at the end of the 19th century.

For the rest, independence across Africa in the second half of the 20th Century occurred before elite cohesion, before enclosure and before industrialisation.  Britain and countries like it were created from the increasingly coordinated actions of families of 'robber barons' made powerful by manipulation, in effect, of market forces and the perversion of freely operating markets of exchange and distribution.  This same dynamic has continued through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century in all the other countries following the classical or neoclassical economic paradigm.

It can only be ended in a manner which might be consistent with the avowed ethical basis that modern societies say that they wish to follow if a re-examination and reconstruction takes place of the precepts required to be adopted for the achievement of those noble goals.   This has been said many times before and continues to be said by almost everybody in the field of political economy, in commerce and governance.  Unfortunately the latter two groups, almost entirely, are inclined to stop looking for fundamental principles at the point where the rationality guiding their self-interest informs them that to go further may be to their personal disadvantage.

Does enclosure need to be contingent with the concentration of control?  Control effectively creates the conditions of a de facto state of ownership.  Even if exercised by a managerial administrative elite is this desirable?  Are their alternatives that may be more consistent with the ethical goals which are today widely 'deified'?

A synthesis cannot proceed without 'A Theory of Moral Precept', nor without an idea of the mathematical tools and the measurement data which are required to be available for such societies to coexist, develop and be governed in the interests and to the benefit of all who live within them.

Or we can keep tinkering, keep measuring, keep proving new constructs that reinforce the logic of the Victorian mindset and which validate the applicability of their underlying ethic in a world which has long ago moved morally beyond that point, but which is still dominated by institutions of power, control and economics which have not moved with the individuals who actually give them reality and substance in our lives and through which they exercise their conceptual influence upon us?

Kindest Regards,

Robin

From an economics perspective, start with:

Donald N. McCloskey (1972). The Enclosure of Open Fields: Preface to a Study of Its Impact on the Efficiency of English Agriculture in the Eighteenth Century. The Journal of Economic History, 32, pp 15-35.

Carl J. Dahlman, The Open Field System and Beyond: A Property Rights Analysis of an Economic Institution. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1980.

For data/evidence and analysis of it, start with:

Michael Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure: Its Historical Geography and Economic History (Folkestone, Kent: William Dawson and Sons, Ltd.; Hamden, CT: Archon Books) 1980

Tom Williamson, The transformation of rural England: farming and the landscape, 1700-1870. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press), 2002.

Mark Overton, Agricultural revolution in England: the transformation of the agrarian economy, 1500-1850. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

I would suggest, John Chapman & Sylvia Seeliger, "Enclosure, Environment & Landscape in Southern England,( Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 2001) ISBN: 0 7524 2079 8.

There has been too much emphasis on the role played by big landowners in the enclosure movement to the neglect of the so-called yeomen farmers, who were quite important in the enclosure movement. It should also be noted that a considerable proportion of the land in England was always enclosed during the medieval era, since there were many free property holders.

See these two articles: 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249044166_Rodney_Hilton_and_the_Peasant_Road_to_%27Capitalism%27_in_England

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280098280_On_the_Origins_of_Capitalism

Article Rodney Hilton and the Peasant Road to 'Capitalism' in England

Article On the Origins of Capitalism

See Historia económica y de la empresa, universal y de España [Reseña bibliográfica] in: http://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/61870

Dear All

I am sincerely thankful for your kind support in providing the sources, information about the sources, and comments on my problem.

Anticipating more...

With kind regards

Israr