Chapter 7 of 14

Enclosure: The Land Becomes Private

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The oak on Mousehold Heath

In early July 1549, at the small market town of Wymondham in Norfolk, the townspeople held their annual feast in honour of Saint Thomas Becket. When the festivities were over, a crowd went out into the surrounding countryside and began to tear down hedges. In the past few years, local landlords had fenced off common land on which the villagers had grazed their cattle and sheep for generations. The crowd pulled the fences up.

One of the landlords whose hedges were threatened, a lawyer named John Flowerdew, tried to divert the crowd. He paid them to go and tear down instead the fences of a neighbour with whom he had a long-running feud: Robert Kett, a prosperous tanner and landowner, who had himself enclosed some common land. What happened next surprised everybody. Kett listened to the rioters' grievances, agreed that they were right, and helped them tear down his own fences. Then he went with them to pull down Flowerdew's.

Within days, Kett was the leader of a movement. Thousands of people from across Norfolk gathered with him in a great camp on Mousehold Heath, a stretch of common land on the hills just outside Norwich, then the second city of England. Contemporary estimates put the camp at around sixteen thousand people. They held court under a great tree they named the Oak of Reformation, where Kett and his council heard complaints against local gentlemen, administered justice and organised supplies. They drew up a list of twenty-nine demands to send to the king, the boy Edward VI. They asked that no lord should be allowed to enclose any more common land, that rents should be returned to the levels of the previous century, that lords should not graze their animals on the commons to the exclusion of tenants, that rivers should be free for all to fish. And, in their sixteenth article, they asked that all bondmen be made free, "for God made all free with his precious blood-shedding".

The rebels took Norwich and held it for several weeks, defeating a first royal army sent against them. In late August, a second army under the Earl of Warwick, including companies of foreign mercenaries, attacked them at a place called Dussindale. The rebels were routed. Around three thousand of them were killed. Kett was taken to London, tried for treason, brought back to Norwich and hanged in chains from the walls of Norwich Castle in December 1549. His brother William was hanged from the tower of Wymondham Abbey.

Kett's rebellion was one of dozens of risings, riots and protests against enclosure in England between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. They almost all failed. And over those four centuries, the land of England, which had for a thousand years been farmed under a web of shared and overlapping rights, was converted into private property owned outright by individuals. It was one of the decisive transformations in the history of the human farm. It created a new kind of fence — the private property line — and a new kind of herd: people who owned nothing but their ability to work.

What the commons were

To understand what was lost, we have to understand what the commons were.

In much of medieval and early modern England, especially across the broad belt of the Midlands, villages were surrounded by two or three great open fields. Each field was divided into long, narrow strips, and each household held strips scattered across all the fields, so that good and bad land was shared out fairly. The fields were farmed together according to rules agreed by the village: which field would lie fallow this year, when ploughing would begin, when the harvest would be gathered. After the harvest, the stubble of the open fields became common grazing for everyone's animals. Beyond the arable fields lay the meadows, cut for hay and then grazed in common, and beyond them the "waste": rough pasture, heath, woodland, fen and moor.

On this land, the villagers held a range of customary rights. The right of pasture let them graze a certain number of animals on the commons. The right of estovers let them gather wood for fuel and repairs; turbary let them cut peat or turf; pannage let them turn pigs into the woods to eat acorns and beech-mast. Gleaners — usually women and children — could gather the grain left behind after the harvest. These rights were not charity. They were part of the customary law of the manor, recorded and defended in the manorial courts, and they were often essential to the survival of the poorest households. A cottager with no more than a garden might still keep a cow, a few geese and a pig on the commons, gather his fuel from the waste and send his children gleaning.

In 1968 the ecologist Garrett Hardin published an influential essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons", arguing that any resource open to all would inevitably be overused and destroyed, because each user had an incentive to take as much as possible before others did. The argument has been endlessly repeated as a justification for private property. But Hardin was describing an imaginary commons with no rules. The real commons of England were nothing of the kind. They were tightly regulated by the manorial courts, which "stinted" the number of animals each household could graze, fined people who took too much and punished outsiders who used them without right. The political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, spent her career documenting how communities around the world had managed shared resources sustainably for centuries through exactly this kind of collective rule-making. The commons were not a tragedy waiting to happen. They were an institution.

They were also a kind of breakout built into the farm. As long as a labouring family had access to the commons, it had something to fall back on that did not depend on a wage or a landlord's favour. The commons were a partial escape route from total dependence. That, as we will see, was precisely what some of their critics disliked about them.

Sheep that eat men

The first great wave of enclosure in England came in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and its driving force was wool.

After the Black Death, as we saw in Chapter 5, labour was scarce and expensive, and grain prices were relatively low. Meanwhile, the cloth industries of Flanders and of England itself were hungry for English wool, which was among the finest in Europe. For a landlord, the arithmetic was compelling. A field of grain required many labourers and many tenants. A pasture of sheep required a shepherd and a dog. If the tenants could be removed and the open fields and commons enclosed with hedges and turned over to sheep, the landlord could make more money with fewer people.

Across the Midlands, many villages were depopulated, their houses pulled down and their fields turned to pasture. The historian Maurice Beresford, in The Lost Villages of England (1954), began the systematic study of the thousands of deserted medieval villages whose traces survive as humps and hollows in the fields. Not all of them were destroyed by enclosure; many had already shrunk because of plague and economic decline. But many were deliberately emptied by landlords converting arable land to sheep-walk.

This was the process that Thomas More described in Utopia in 1516, in the image with which the last chapter ended. The sheep that were once so meek, his traveller says, now devour men, and lay waste fields, houses and towns. Noblemen, gentlemen and even abbots, not content with the rents their ancestors had lived on, leave no ground for tillage, enclose everything for pasture, throw down houses and leave nothing standing but the church, to be used as a sheep-house. The tenants are driven out, by fraud or force or by being worn down with injuries, and must sell their goods for almost nothing and wander away — and when they have spent what little they have, what can they do but steal and be hanged, or go begging and be thrown in prison as vagabonds?

The Tudor crown, interestingly, was against enclosure — or at least against depopulating enclosure. Laws were passed against it in 1489 and 1515; Cardinal Wolsey set up a commission of inquiry in 1517 which led to prosecutions of hundreds of landlords; further commissions and statutes followed throughout the century. The reasons were the same as those of the Mesopotamian kings who cancelled debts. Depopulated villages meant fewer taxpayers, fewer soldiers for the king's armies and more dangerous vagrants on the roads. The interests of the 0.01% at the top — the crown — were not the same as those of the landlords who formed the broader elite. But the laws were evaded, the commissions were staffed by local gentry who were often enclosers themselves, and the movement continued.

When the herd rose, the crown sided with the landlords. Kett's rebellion of 1549 was crushed. So was the Midland Revolt of 1607, in which thousands of people in Northamptonshire, Warwickshire and Leicestershire tore down hedges and filled in ditches under a leader who called himself "Captain Pouch". At Newton in Northamptonshire, the local gentry and their servants attacked a crowd of rioters and killed some forty or fifty of them. The rioters of 1607 were among the first people in England to be called "Levellers" and "Diggers": they levelled the hedges and dug up the enclosures.

A common treasury

Those names were taken up again in the revolution of the 1640s.

During the English Civil War, as Parliament fought and defeated King Charles I, an extraordinary variety of radical ideas burst into the open. The Levellers, a movement with strong support in the parliamentary army, demanded a broad franchise, religious toleration and equality before the law. At the Putney Debates of 1647, in which officers and elected representatives of the soldiers argued about the future constitution of England, the Leveller Colonel Thomas Rainsborough made the most famous declaration of the debate: that the poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he, and that every man who is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under it. The army's leadership, led by Oliver Cromwell's son-in-law Henry Ireton, replied that the vote must be restricted to those with a "permanent fixed interest" in the kingdom — in other words, to men of property. Otherwise, Ireton warned, the propertyless majority might use their votes to take property away.

In April 1649, three months after the execution of the king, a small group of men and women led by a bankrupt cloth merchant named Gerrard Winstanley went to St George's Hill in Surrey and began to dig and plant vegetables on the common land there. They called themselves the True Levellers; everyone else called them the Diggers. In their manifesto, The True Levellers Standard Advanced, Winstanley declared that in the beginning God had made the earth a common treasury for all, beasts and men alike, and that the enclosure of the land by a few was a betrayal of creation. He argued that ordinary people should not work for wages for landlords, but should cultivate the commons together.

The Diggers were harassed, beaten and their crops trampled by local landowners and their men; their houses were pulled down; they were taken to court. By the spring of 1650 their colonies at St George's Hill and nearby Cobham had been broken up. Their numbers had never been more than a few dozen. But Winstanley's writings have been read ever since as one of the first, and clearest, statements of the idea that the land itself should not be anybody's private property.

The story: improvement and property

The farm, as always, had its own story — and in the century after the Civil War it acquired its most influential version.

In 1689 the philosopher John Locke published his Two Treatises of Government. In the fifth chapter of the second treatise, "Of Property", he set out to explain how private property could arise in a world that God had given to mankind in common. His answer was labour. When a man mixed his labour with something taken from nature — picking an apple, killing a deer, ploughing a field — he made it his own. Land that was left uncultivated was waste. Land that was enclosed and improved by labour produced, Locke estimated, ten times more than the same land left in common — and so the man who enclosed land and improved it did not diminish the common stock of mankind but increased it.

Locke's argument was subtle, and it has been read in many ways. But it supplied a powerful justification for enclosure. Common land, in this view, was under-used and wasteful; private property was productive; and the man who enclosed and improved the land was a benefactor of humanity, not a thief. Locke also made a famous observation: "in the beginning all the world was America". The lands of the Native Americans, he argued, were uncultivated and therefore available to be appropriated by those who would improve them. The story that justified enclosing the English commons justified, at the same time, taking the land of a continent. We will follow that thread in the next chapter.

Within a century, the lawyer William Blackstone could describe the right of property, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1766), as "that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe". The tangle of overlapping rights that had governed the medieval countryside — the lord's rights, the tenant's rights, the commoner's rights, the gleaner's rights — had been replaced, in principle, by the absolute right of a single owner.

The story of the eighteenth century was "improvement". Agricultural writers such as Arthur Young praised the enclosing landlord who drained marshes, planted turnips and clover, bred better livestock and introduced new crop rotations. Open fields and commons were portrayed as backward, inefficient and a haven for the idle. This story contained real truths: there were genuine innovations in farming in this period, and English agriculture did become highly productive. But it presented a transfer of property as though it were simply a technical improvement.

Enclosure by Act of Parliament

The second great wave of English enclosure took place mostly between about 1750 and 1830, and this time the instrument was Parliament itself.

The procedure was straightforward. The owners of land in a parish who wanted to enclose it petitioned Parliament for a private Act. What counted was not the number of people who supported the petition but the value of the land they owned: in practice, the consent of the owners of around three-quarters or four-fifths of the land by value was generally required. A large landowner, or a few, could therefore enclose a parish over the objections of most of its inhabitants. Parliament, which was itself composed overwhelmingly of landowners, almost always passed the Act. Commissioners were appointed to survey the parish, assess everyone's claims and redraw the map. The open fields, commons and waste were divided up into compact, privately owned blocks, which the new owners were required to fence or hedge. The costs of the process — the Act, the surveyors, the commissioners, the lawyers and the fencing — were divided among the owners in proportion to their allotments.

Thousands of enclosure Acts were passed between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. The economic historian Michael Turner estimated that parliamentary enclosure affected roughly a fifth of the land area of England. It was not the whole story: J. R. Wordie argued that even more land had been enclosed earlier, especially in the seventeenth century, by private agreements that left fewer records. Both kinds of enclosure ended with the same result. By the mid-nineteenth century, open fields and commons had almost vanished from the English landscape.

Who gained? Large landowners, overwhelmingly. Their land was consolidated into efficient blocks, and they could raise rents. The economic historian Robert Allen, in Enclosure and the Yeoman (1992), studied the South Midlands in detail and concluded that enclosure produced only modest gains in agricultural output compared with the improved open-field farming that had preceded it, but that rents on enclosed land roughly doubled. In Allen's analysis, the main effect of enclosure was not to make the land more productive but to redistribute its income from farmers and commoners to landlords. Other historians, such as Mark Overton, have argued that enclosure did make a more significant contribution to rising productivity. The debate continues. What is not disputed is who received the rent.

Who lost? Above all, the people whose rights in the commons were customary rather than formal. A small owner with a recognised right of common received a small allotment of land in compensation — often too small to be useful, and burdened with a share of the costs of enclosure and fencing that he could not afford, so that many sold up. A cottager whose right of common had never been written down, or who simply used the waste as everyone always had, often received nothing at all. The historian J. M. Neeson, in her study Commoners (1993), showed how much these rights had been worth to the poor — fuel, milk, meat, eggs, a little income from geese or a cow — and how their loss pushed families into complete dependence on wages and poor relief.

Even Arthur Young, the great champion of improvement, came to have doubts. In a pamphlet of 1801, after touring parishes that had been enclosed, he wrote that by nineteen out of twenty enclosure bills the poor were injured, and most grossly. He recorded the words of a labourer who had lost his rights: "All I know is, I had a cow, and an Act of Parliament has taken it from me."

The poet John Clare, himself a farm labourer from Helpston in Northamptonshire, watched the enclosure of his own parish in the early nineteenth century, and wrote its elegy in his poem "The Mores":

Inclosure came and trampled on the grave Of labours rights and left the poor a slave

And an anonymous rhyme, which circulated in many versions, put the matter in four lines:

The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common, But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from the goose.

"A sort of independence"

One of the most revealing things about enclosure is how openly some of its supporters stated its purpose. Enclosure did not merely transfer land. It was intended to change the behaviour of the people who had lived on it.

In 1794, the newly established Board of Agriculture began publishing county surveys. The report on Shropshire, by John Bishton, complained that the use of common land by labourers operated upon their minds as "a sort of independence". If the commons were enclosed, Bishton argued, the labourers would work every day of the year, their children would be put out to work early, and that subordination of the lower ranks of society which was so much wanted in the present times would be considerably secured. Other writers made the same point in different words. The commons let the poor survive without working regularly for others. Take them away, and they would have no choice.

The clergyman Joseph Townsend, in his Dissertation on the Poor Laws of 1786, was blunter still. Legal compulsion to work, he argued, caused too much trouble and violence. Hunger was better. Hunger, he wrote, would tame the fiercest animals; it would teach decency and civility, obedience and subjection, to the most perverse. It is hard to find a clearer statement of the logic of the farm in any period. The aim was not to destroy the herd but to make it docile — and the most efficient fence of all was the absence of any alternative.

Karl Marx, writing Capital in the 1860s, called this process "primitive accumulation": the historical process by which producers were separated from their means of production, so that they became "free" labourers — free in a double sense, as Marx put it, free to sell their labour to whoever would buy it, and free of any other means of living. The history of this expropriation, he wrote, "is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire." One need not accept the rest of Marx's theory to see the force of the point. A labour market requires people who have nothing to sell but their labour. Enclosure, in England, helped to create them.

The fence of the Poor Law

What happened to people who were thrown off the land? From the sixteenth century onwards, the English state built a second fence to manage them.

The Tudors treated the wandering poor, the "sturdy beggars" and "vagabonds" produced in part by enclosure, as criminals. A Vagrancy Act of 1547 provided that an able-bodied person who refused to work could be branded with the letter V and made the slave of whoever reported him for two years; the Act proved unworkable and was repealed in 1550, but later laws prescribed whipping, ear-boring and, for repeated offences, death. At the same time, Tudor governments developed a system of public relief. The great Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601 made each parish responsible for its own poor, financed by a compulsory local tax, the poor rate, and administered by unpaid overseers. It provided relief for the old and the sick, apprenticeship for poor children, and work for the able-bodied unemployed.

The system was in some ways remarkably humane by the standards of its time. But it also became a fence. The Settlement Act of 1662 allowed parishes to remove newcomers who might become a charge on the poor rate back to the parish where they had a legal "settlement". The poor could be shipped back to their home parish like stray livestock. Mobility, for those without property, depended on the permission of the parish officers.

In 1795, as war with France drove up the price of bread and threatened famine, the magistrates of Berkshire, meeting at the village of Speenhamland, adopted a scale that supplemented the wages of labourers out of the poor rates according to the price of bread and the size of their families. Similar systems spread across southern England. Their effects are still debated. Critics at the time, and the economic historian Karl Polanyi much later in The Great Transformation (1944), argued that such allowances allowed farmers to pay wages below subsistence and let the parish make up the difference, trapping labourers in dependency. Later research has questioned how widespread and how damaging the system really was.

The reaction, when it came, was severe. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, shaped by the reformers Edwin Chadwick and Nassau Senior, abolished outdoor relief for the able-bodied in principle and required them to enter a workhouse instead. Conditions inside were to be governed by the principle of "less eligibility": life in the workhouse must be less attractive than the life of the poorest independent labourer outside it. Families were separated on entry — husbands from wives, parents from children. Inmates wore uniforms and performed hard, monotonous labour. In 1845 a scandal broke at the workhouse in Andover, Hampshire, where it emerged that starving inmates set to crushing animal bones for fertiliser had been fighting over the bones to suck out the marrow and gnaw the scraps of meat on them.

The workhouse was the Poor Law's version of Townsend's hunger: a fence designed to make the alternative to wage labour so terrible that anyone would choose any job at any wage instead.

The law of the owners

Around the new property line, the law built ever higher walls. In 1723, Parliament passed the Waltham Black Act, aimed at gangs of poachers in the royal forests who blackened their faces. It created around fifty new capital offences in a single statute, including hunting deer, poaching fish or cutting down trees while armed and disguised. The historian E. P. Thompson, in Whigs and Hunters (1975), showed how the Act grew out of conflicts between forest communities, who claimed customary rights to the forests' resources, and new landowners and officials determined to enforce exclusive property. By the end of the eighteenth century, English law listed some two hundred offences punishable by death — the so-called Bloody Code — the great majority of them offences against property.

The Game Laws, meanwhile, reserved the right to kill game to men with substantial landed property. A labourer who snared a rabbit on land that had once been common, to feed his family, could be imprisoned or transported to Australia. In the early nineteenth century, landowners guarded their game with spring-guns and man-traps until these were banned in 1827.

The breakouts continued, and so did their suppression. In the late summer and autumn of 1830, farm labourers across southern and eastern England, desperate after years of low wages, unemployment and harsh poor relief, rose in a wave of protest known as the Swing Riots, after the mythical "Captain Swing" who signed threatening letters to farmers and magistrates. They broke the new threshing machines that were taking away their winter work, burned ricks and demanded higher wages. The authorities responded with special commissions: nineteen people were executed and nearly five hundred transported to Australia. Four years later, in 1834, six farm labourers from the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset, led by a Methodist preacher named George Loveless, were sentenced to seven years' transportation for swearing a secret oath when they formed a society to resist wage cuts. A mass campaign of petitions and demonstrations followed, and in 1836 the "Tolpuddle Martyrs" were pardoned. They are remembered as founding figures of the British trade union movement — a sign of the form the next breakouts would take.

The Clearances

North of the border, the transformation of the land took an even starker form.

For centuries, the Scottish Highlands had been organised around the clans: kinship groups in which the chief held the land on behalf of his people, and the clansmen owed him rents in kind and military service in return for land and protection. The system was hierarchical, and often harsh, but it rested on a sense of mutual obligation, and on the chief's need for men. After the defeat of the Jacobite rising at Culloden in 1746, the British state set out to destroy the military power of the clans. The chiefs were transformed into commercial landlords, owning their estates outright in law, often living in Edinburgh or London and needing cash rather than men.

From the late eighteenth century, many of them found that their land was more profitable as sheep-walk for southern graziers than as farms for their own tenants. Over the following decades, tens of thousands of Highlanders were removed from the inland glens. Some were resettled on small coastal plots — crofts — too small to live on, where they were expected to work in the kelp industry or in fishing for their landlords' profit. Many others emigrated, voluntarily or under pressure, to Canada, Australia and the United States.

The most notorious clearances took place on the vast estates of the Countess of Sutherland and her husband, the Marquess of Stafford, later Duke of Sutherland, among the richest men in Britain. Between roughly 1807 and 1821, thousands of people were moved from the interior of Sutherland to the coast. In 1814, in Strathnaver, the estate's factor Patrick Sellar, who was himself taking over the cleared land as a sheep farmer, oversaw evictions in which houses were burned to prevent the tenants from returning. An elderly woman, too frail to be moved, was carried out of one of the burning houses and died some days later. Sellar was tried for culpable homicide at Inverness in 1816 and acquitted by a jury of local landowners and their associates. The historian Eric Richards, the most careful modern student of the Clearances, has emphasised that they varied enormously, that landlords often believed they were improving their tenants' lives, and that economic pressures were real. But he has not doubted the scale of the dispossession, or how it was experienced by those who suffered it.

The Highlanders' breakout came later, and it worked. In the early 1880s, crofters on Skye and elsewhere began to refuse rents, occupy land and resist evictions, in what came to be called the Crofters' War. Police and even gunboats were sent. But the crofters organised a Highland Land League, won public sympathy and elected their own members of Parliament. A royal commission under Lord Napier investigated their grievances, and in 1886 the Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act gave crofters security of tenure, fair rents and the right to pass their holdings on to their heirs. It did not undo the Clearances. But it stopped them.

In Ireland, where most land was owned by a small Protestant landlord class and worked by Catholic tenants on insecure leases, the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852 killed about a million people and drove a million or more to emigrate. During the famine, a clause of the 1847 Poor Law extension — the Gregory clause — denied public relief to anyone holding more than a quarter of an acre of land unless they gave it up, forcing many starving families to surrender their holdings in order to eat. A generation later, the Irish National Land League, founded by Michael Davitt in 1879, organised mass rent strikes and the social ostracism of land agents who evicted tenants. The tactic took its name from the first famous victim, a land agent in County Mayo called Captain Charles Boycott. A series of Land Acts followed, and by the early twentieth century state-financed purchase schemes had begun to transfer the land of Ireland from landlords to the tenants who farmed it. Here, too, organisation succeeded where riot had failed.

Who owned England?

By the nineteenth century, the land of Britain was concentrated in astonishingly few hands. In 1872, Parliament ordered a survey of landownership, the first since Domesday Book — and it was promptly nicknamed the "New Domesday". It was undertaken partly in the hope of rebutting radical claims that the land of the country was monopolised by a few thousand families. When the results were analysed, notably by the landowner John Bateman in The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland, they showed that the radicals had been broadly right: a few thousand owners, many of them peers and great gentry, held the majority of the land of the British Isles. The returns contained many errors, and the precise proportions are still debated. The general picture is not.

Eight centuries after William the Conqueror counted every ox, cow and pig in England, the farm was still owned by a tiny number of families. What had changed was the nature of their ownership, and the condition of the herd. In 1086, most of the people who worked the land were bound to it. In 1873, most of the people of England were bound to nothing. They were free to go anywhere. They owned nothing but their labour, and they had to sell it to live.

What enclosure teaches

The fence of this chapter is the most modern one so far: the private property line itself, defended by hedges and ditches, by Acts of Parliament, the Black Act and the Game Laws, by the vagrancy laws and the Settlement Act, and finally by the workhouse.

The feed was rent, which on enclosed land often doubled, and labour, now obtained not by compulsion but by the absence of any alternative — what Townsend called the taming power of hunger.

The shepherds were the enclosure commissioners and surveyors, the magistrates and the overseers of the poor, the factors who cleared the glens and the "improving" writers who explained why it was all for the best.

The story was improvement: Locke's argument that labour creates property and enclosure increases the common stock; Blackstone's "sole and despotic dominion"; the image of the commons as wasteful, and of commoners as idle.

The breakouts ranged from Kett's camp under the Oak of Reformation, the Midland Levellers and Winstanley's Diggers to the Swing Riots and the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Most failed. But the later ones point towards a change: the crofters and the Irish tenants won, not by riot, but by organisation — leagues, rent strikes, boycotts and votes.

Enclosure's most important legacy was the creation of a population that depended entirely on wages. In the next two chapters, we will follow that population into its two great destinations: the plantations across the Atlantic, where enslaved Africans were forced to produce sugar and cotton for European markets; and the factories of the industrial revolution.

Bridge: all the world was America

John Locke, as we have seen, wrote that in the beginning all the world was America. He knew a great deal about America. In 1669 he had helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, a founding document for the English colony of that name, as secretary to one of its proprietors, Lord Ashley. The constitutions gave every freeman of Carolina "absolute power and authority over his negro slaves". Locke was also, for a time, an investor in the Royal African Company, which held the English monopoly on the slave trade.

The same philosopher who explained how labour made property helped write the law that made human beings into property. The enclosure of the English commons and the enclosure of the Atlantic world were two sides of the same process. In the next chapter, we follow it across the ocean.