The enclosures created economic choice by commodifying land and labor.
Evidence
Because of advances in shipping and navigation, international trade in things like wool, linen, silk and spices made them lucrative, thus giving British landlords an idea: why not evict en masse the serfs from land that produced worthless turnips and replace them with sheep whose backs produced precious wool for the international markets? The peasants’ eviction, which we now remember as the ‘enclosures’ – for it involved fencing them off from the land their ancestors had toiled for centuries – gave the majority of people something they had lost at the time that agriculture was invented: choice. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 99
Categorization
- XREF: The enclosures mechanism will likely be mirrored by the platform ‘cloud’ enclosure later in the book; prefigures the digital enclosure thesis. — connects to: Capitalist accumulation was built on colonial conquest and enslavement. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 82; The new enclosures privatize access to identity, as the old ones privatized land; Enclosures briefly gave evicted serfs the economic choice they had lost — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 99
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 99
Broader Connections
- Capitalist accumulation was built on colonial conquest and enslavement.
#expands(0.75) — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 82 - The new enclosures privatize access to identity, as the old ones privatized land
#complicates(0.70)