The enclosure movement destroyed rural community through theft of common land

Evidence

The enclosure movement usually refers to the historical moment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England when common land was appropriated by the English government and aristocracy, taken from those who lived on the land who were then forced to rent the land they lived on back from the new aristocratic ”owners.” In the process, family members had to leave and work in factories in cities, destroying rural community in the name of capitalist “progress” through the theft of resources. To some degree, the narrative of communist triumph suggests that this lost agrarian community will be restored in the future. Narratives such as these defer to some lost wholeness from the past that will then emerge once again in the future, a structure Jacques Derrida memorably termed “hauntological.” — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 101

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The enclosure movement as the original theft of commons could reframe ‘Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure’ — commons-appropriation as the flip side of infrastructure-creation.
• XREF: connects to: Capitalism’s birth required peasants to lose autonomous access to common lands.; Twentieth-century Swedish land reforms dismantled communal extraction commons. — Emil Sandström and Ann-Kristin Ekman and Karl-Johan Lindholm, Commoning in the periphery – The role…, 43; The English Enclosure Acts forced peasants off commons land into factory labor. — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1365 (+4 more)