by Steven Stoll
More typically, enclosure narrowed the uses of land. An act of 1773 helps to clarify the logic. It condemned the use of two common fields in Oxford totaling five thousand acres. Lawyers for Philip Wenman, 7th Viscount Wenman of Tuam, insisted that the fields combined too many functions in too many divisions, “intermixed, and dispersed in small parcels,” and “inconveniently situate[d].” Viscount Wenman didn’t see a complex assortment of products and cycles at work in the fields. He saw a stagnant, incoherent mess, “incapable of improvement” without his control. The lawyers summed up their brief: “So long as the same lie open and unenclosed, will produce but little Profit.” This is how agricultural improvement served the justification for enclosure.36
Midland peasants revolted against this logic. According to one historian, “One hundred and twenty-five enclosure riots occurred during the reign of James I and Charles I alone. It seems that the pattern of social protest was keeping apace with the pattern of social change during the transition towards … capitalism.” In 1607, at least one thousand rioters in Northamptonshire tore up hedges and filled in ditches that demarcated land claimed by Sir Thomas Tresham. The peasants made a statement: “Wee, as members of the whole, doe feele the smarte of these incroaching Tirants, which would grind our flesh upon the whetstone of poverty, and make our loyall hearts to faint with breathing, so that they may dwell by themselves in the midst of theyr heards of fatt wethers.” James I didn’t flinch from the whetstone. His forces killed forty or fifty insurgents and hanged the peasant general John Reynolds.
The threat of violence had not subsided by 1649 when Gerrard Winstanley placed his name atop a list of forty-five of “the poor oppressed people of England, and the whole world.” They demanded the return of the common lands to those who “labor the Earth to cast in seed,” and castigated with Biblical invective lords who held “the Treasury of the Earth, locked up in your Bags, Chests, and Barns.”
The main thing we aym at, and for which we declare our Resolutions to go forth, and act, is this, To lay hold upon, and as we stand in need, to cut and fell, and make the best advantage we can of the Woods and Trees, that grow upon the Commons, To be a stock for our selves, and our poor Brethren, through the land of England, to plant the Commons withal; and to provide us bread to eat, till the Fruit of our labors in the Earth bring forth increase; and we shall meddle with none of your Proprieties (but what is called Commonage) till the Spirit in you, make you cast up your Lands and Goods, which were got, and still is kept in your hands by murder, and theft.
Winstanley demanded sufficiency (“To be a stock for our selves”), commodities for exchange (“and make the best advantage we can”), and a dignified existence without becoming intertwined with the owners of properties. Rebels against enclosure spoke for a feudal order that cannot be understood as dysfunctional or backward. Maybe one reason we assume it to have been is that our received story justifies the demise of older social forms, especially if they provided a realm of peasant autonomy averse to the wants of lords and tenants, the inventors of what came next.
And yet, sometimes peasants gained rights within the tumult. They remained in villages and evaded enclosure. One lord was so strapped for money that he sold the manor lands of Winston Magna to its inhabitants in 1606. The common fields survived. The village became free of any lord. Winston Magna is just one case, but it indicates something important. Historical events never have simple or obvious implications. Some people thrived by using the very instruments intended to dispossess them.
Still, by 1850, the grasping lords had enclosed all of the South Midlands (2.8 million acres), along with 75 to 80 percent of all the farmland in England. Enclosure annihilated the peasant economy. It removed the capacity of tens of thousands of people to meet their own needs. In this way, it satisfied those who argued, along with James Steuart, that labor and land were wasted that did not contribute to the accumulation of capital. English peasants sometimes ended up with land after enclosure, as tenants or cottars, but without the wastes they became dependent on money, a representation of value over which they had no control. Take note of this. A century or so later, nearly the same thing happened in the southern mountains of eastern North America.37
Enclosure solved a problem much grander than increasing pasturage for sheep. It transformed people who had always decided when or whether to sell the things they made into wageworkers whose every motion created a commodity for their employers to sell. “As long as people can lay their hands on the means of production,” explains the anthropologist Eric Wolf, “there is no compelling reason for them to sell their capacity to work to someone else. For labor power to be offered for sale, the tie between producers and the means of production has to be severed for good.” Enclosure severed labor from land and made both available for other uses. Smallholders who once owned the entire value of their labor, wrote one observer in 1812, “will be converted into a body of men who earn their subsistence by working for others, and who will be under a necessity of going to market for all they want … There will, perhaps, be more labour, because there will be more compulsion to it.” Marx compared enclosure to a scissors. “The first blade served to undermine the ability of people to provide for themselves. The other blade was a system of stern measures required to keep people from finding alternative survival strategies outside the system of wage labor.” For all their differences, Marx and Steuart would have agreed that capitalism is not well described as the freedom to sell one’s labor.38
Dependency always travels with its shadow, a depth of poverty unknown before the sixteenth century. The word pauper first appeared in 1516, meaning someone with no home but the poorhouse and no means of livelihood. In the 1770s, a Welsh minister wrote of the shattering dislocation going on before him. “The depriving the peasantry of all landed property has beggared multitudes.” He had seen “an amazing number of people … reduced from a comfortable state of partial independence to the precarious condition of hirelings, who, when out of work, must immediately come to their parish.” A dispossessed army of labor could be hired at prices “below its proper level,” resulting in a destitution he had never seen, the starving “crowded together in decayed farm-houses, with hardly ground enough about them for a cabbage garden.” Cast out of work, they ran out of food. The minister continued, “This new mode of life has been the fruitful source of numerous evils … it has spread the vices of the capital over the whole kingdom.”39
Writers expressed the brutality of enclosure in poetry and prose. Oliver Goldsmith witnessed a village being torn down during the 1760s in order to construct a garden, probably at Nuneham Courtenay in Oxfordshire. Lords delighted in paintings of Arcadian landscapes. They liked actual landscapes even better and sometimes transformed their estates into symbolic renderings of rural life, with anything unsightly excised from the frame. If the drawing room faced the village, then the village had to go. Goldsmith recoiled at this destruction in The Deserted Village (1770), a description of enclosure as a new kind of plague, in which “wealth accumulates, and men decay.”
… a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
A time there was, ere England’s griefs began,
When every rood of ground maintained its man;
For him light labour spread her wholesome store,
Just gave what life required, but gave no more …
Seventy years later, Friedrich Engels described paupers adrift on the turnpikes with their emaciated, rickets-enfeebled children, begging at the kitchen doors of country estates, sleeping in churches before being driven into London workhouses for the barest relief, turned out faint and feverish with typhus, then dying on the streets, their bodies “dumped into the earth like infected cattle” atop a pile of rotting corpses fourteen feet deep. Supporters of the new system fastened it to the motions of the stars and asserted that any tampering with market mechanics would result in disaster, yet they ended up in a paradox. They justified huma
n suffering as indispensable to the attainment of human progress.40
The new system was supposed to create more wealth and more food. Why then did paupers proliferate when the abundance made possible by enclosure should have put an end to all want? Food did pour out of improved farmland. Between 1600 and 1800, the combined average of all cereal crops (wheat, rye, barley, and oats) in Norfolk increased from twelve to twenty-two bushels per acre, or by almost 100 percent. Between 1801 and 1871, yields for the same crops throughout England rose by 47 percent. Diets diversified, especially for the well-off. Bread and oats gave way to potatoes and green vegetables. But many still starved. Between 1700 and perhaps as late as 1900, writes Robert Fogel, “even prime-aged males had only a meager amount of energy available for work.” The English laboring class of 1750 didn’t merely fall short of the daily dietary minimum—they missed it by one thousand calories.
The cause of hunger was not technological but social. The working poor could not afford to eat regularly. The average yearly income for a laborer in 1750 (in one region of England) ranged from eight to twelve pounds, but the cost of living for a family of five came to more than fourteen pounds. According to the historian Keith Wrightson, “only a minority of skilled workers could have maintained their families adequately on their own earnings.” This is why England needed poor laws even at the peak of its economic and commercial power. Capitalism did produce more of everything but at the cost of overturning a social order that, while based in a rigid hierarchy, also protected people from hunger and homelessness. “Few people living in this world bequeathed to us by the enclosing and improving farmer,” writes the historian Joan Thirsk, “are capable of gauging the full significance of a way of life that is now lost.” Even Arthur Young had second thoughts, though no one advocated so strenuously for enclosure or did more to boost the productivity of lordly estates. “I had rather that all the commons of England were sunk in the sea, than that the poor should in future be treated on enclosing as they have been hitherto.”41
No other place replicated conditions in England, its peasantry, aristocracy, or Parliament. But to insist on England’s uniqueness would be to misunderstand its importance. Enclosure has never stopped. The same lordly families who seized the common lands invested in plantations on the island of Jamaica and in the Tidewater counties of Virginia. What else were the wars against the Cherokee and the Sioux but acts of accumulation by dispossession? Enclosure continues today in Africa, where corporations lease land from financially fragile governments to produce sugar and rice. The enclosure of West Virginia happened differently. Legally speaking, the commons there was not really common. Much of it already belonged to capitalists. But the people who took from that land for a century regarded it as theirs. It functioned as common property.
I will say more about all this in a later chapter. For now, there is one other similarity between seventeenth-century England and every other example of enclosure. The entities that confront each other in these conflicts are incongruous. Capital is a creature of state power, but peasants can get along fine without either. The political scientist Göran Hydén, who studies development in Africa, puts the problem neatly: “History has demonstrated that the development of modern society is inconceivable without the subordination of the peasantry.” Though the scale and complexity of this epochal conflict might not always seem apparent to those who live in the United States and Europe today, it lies behind much of the history of western societies during the last four centuries.42
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ENCLOSURE ALONE DOES NOT EXPLAIN how capitalism works. For that we need to go back to the gentry and the novel situation they entered when the commons became private property. Lords no longer ruled over resident peasants who provided for them. They now owned real estate, land valued in money and legally alienable, meaning that it could be sold and the money invested in some other venture. All this meant that lordly estates needed to continually justify the value they represented by showing a profit. When land became a commodity, all the things it produced became commodities. But gouty, puffy, land-rich lords were not farmers. They would not be the ones who turned over the earth in order to make it pay.43
Enter the tenants. Tenancy had existed for hundreds of years by the sixteenth century. Even under capitalism, tenants and lords followed longstanding customs that controlled things like subletting, cutting timber, and opening probate when a tenant died. Left over from the old feudal tenures and obligations, these customs placed a greater emphasis on community survival and mutual obligation than on profit. As early as the sixteenth century, however, aristocratic proprietors began to favor more flexible arrangements, in order, as Wrightson puts it, “to carve for themselves a bigger share of the income to be derived from the land.” A series of pressures and squeezes set off a chain reaction. Population increased during the recovery from the Black Death. Competition among tenants drove higher rents, which placed pressure on tenants to amplify their yields.
What happened next was a kind of Big Bang. After tenants paid rent, any money left over belonged to them. If they used their earned coin to purchase improved tools or rent additional fields, they harvested more, exchanged more, and increased their net profit, allowing them to invest more, and so on. Tenants who deployed their gains to make greater gains entered a circuit. Rather than grow food and exchange some of it for money so they could go on sustaining their households, they began with money in order to turn it into more money. They entered the circuit of capital.44
Capital is money in motion. It’s not a bag of seed or a college education or an idea for a new business or your terrific potential as an artist or the car you drive to work. It’s not even the same thing as wealth. If capital is any of these things, then no one knows how long it has existed. If we count a spear or topsoil as capital, then capital has no historical specificity. Capital is a social relationship connected to the modes of production essential to its continual creation. It is surplus value in the act of generating surplus value—profit that creates profit. Marx expressed it as M→C(MP + LP)→C′→M+ΔM, in which money (M) is advanced to buy commodities (C). These commodities consist of the means of production (MP) (which includes things like land and factories but also raw material like wool) and labor-power (LP). My labor-power is my capacity to work, and it’s the most important purchase, because it’s the only factor that creates more value than it costs. Think of it like this: If a manufacturer pays me ten dollars for a day’s work, he can turn my strength and stamina into a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars in sweaters or anything else. Production results in these second-order commodities (C′), the finished goods that go to sale for the original money advanced, plus an increment (M+ΔM). Money does not become capital until or unless it is advanced, until it is set into motion to complete another circuit. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, Capital is as capital does.45
The word capital first appeared between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries for the top or head of something (from the Latin caput, or “head”), like the capital of a marble column. Between 1400 and 1600, it came to refer to the greatest height or degree of something, like capital crimes and capital cities. At the same time, the word developed the meaning of an important sum of money. Fernand Braudel found this sense in Italian as far back as 1211. Saint Bernardino of Siena wrote in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century of “that prolific cause of wealth we commonly call capital.” But sums of money had not yet become perpetuating funds.
Other English words carried similar meanings. Cattle and chattel came into English between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, not as words for barnyard creatures but for property, goods, and even money itself.46 Horses, oxen, and bovines became cattle (around 1400) because they amounted to significant forms of property; the word did not become specific to bovines until the sixteenth century. Stock, another word for accumulated value, denoted something that sprouted and spawned endlessly, like a stem or tree trunk, until about 1380 when it shows up as a word for domesticate
d animals. It did not describe a growing herd of livestock until the sixteenth century. But around that time, stock took a turn. It began to take on meanings similar to capital. By 1526, it referred to money that could be invested; by 1714, it was in common use as the subscribed capital of a merchant house.
Capital pulled away from these other words. By the time Smith had published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, political economists in Britain and France had already given it the meaning it carries today. Smith used the term capital stock, suggesting money that reproduced a percentage of itself in a given time. According to Braudel, a Russian consul made the essential distinction, reporting that France under Napoleon Bonaparte fought “with her capital,” while the countries that France invaded fought “with their income.” For centuries, few institutional pathways existed for employing income in order to earn additional income. Capital appeared along with these pathways, as people needed a word to differentiate this new entity from merchant wealth and the dividends represented by lambs and calves.47
Braudel offers a useful way of thinking about what made capital different from other forms of value. He identified three parallel economies in fifteenth-century Europe. Most people produced household food and commodities and then exchanged them in towns. Other people lived in towns where they bought and sold in a freewheeling marketplace. These two groups describe a competitive commercial world. But a few merchants derived exceptional profit from trade and manufacturing and then reinvested it, sometimes through international channels. Braudel makes a distinction between a market society (represented by country and town) and the world of capital. Capitalist firms came from the very same messy, chaotic social division of labor—just as Walmart began as a family-owned discount store in rural Arkansas. But while capitalist firms require markets, they attempt to create monopolies. Their goal is to dominate competitors, something impossible for the nearly undifferentiated fruit sellers in the town square.