When I took a gen ed history course in Freshman year if undergrad, this topic was taught as the evil capitalists stealing commons from the commoners (enclosure acts). Afaict no mention of the downside of the open system was made, nor any mention of the benefits of consolidation and helped usher in the Industrial Revolution
I think the downsides were probably real (though in certain respects exaggerated: it's often made out like EVERYONE had claims on the commons, but it was usually strictly regulated to avoid the tragedy of the commons), but the upsides of enclosure are rarely discussed.
As a college history major I stumbled into a course taught by (I later realized) one of the department's sidelined profs whose work was ignored by the others. He had no TAs assigned to him, etc. The course was on the "Economic History of Europe" and turned out to be eye opening precisely because he, though not an economist, insisted that we consider the practical economics of things like enclosure. I didn't then understand why that perspective was considered eccentric, but anyway actual human history started making way more sense. Still does.
This reminds me of Michael Heller's 2008 book 'The Gridlock Economy.' On a wider note, though, we do tend to forget just how much rests on really basic things like adequate infrastructure. This is particularly true for anywhere more than a few miles or km from the coast or a serious river port. You could be the best entrepreneur in the world in mediaeval England, and your ambitions would likely be limited to selling turnips locally unless you lived in a port city that could trade with other port cities. As one of the Scottish kings put it, the interior landscape (specifically, that of the Kingdom of Fife in his telling) was a "beggar's mantle fringed with gold."
I think that you are greatly exaggerating the importance of the Glorious Revolution. Most of the factors that you mentioned were not direct outcomes of the political events of 1688. Just because something happened after 1688, does not mean that the Glorious Revolution caused it.
Very interesting hypothesis – I'll check it out. I agree that post hoc does not imply propter hoc, but I think in this case the mechanism is absolutely straightforward and blindingly obvious: greater parliamentary productivity and legitimacy. A committee of landowners fixed land problems.
"Blindingly obvious" is hyperbole, not evidence. And I do not know what "greater parliamentary productivity" means.
In particular, I think that you greatly overstate the impact of post-1688 parliamentary enclosures on agricultural productivity. And agriculture was only one factor on British industrialization.
Agriculture in southeast England was high in productivity long before 1688. Farmers in southeast England copied Commercial farming practices pioneered in Flanders and the Netherlands long before that date. Robert Allen has shown that increase in agricultural productivity are clearly in evidence 1450–1550 and were even stronger in the next century.
Parliamentary enclosures after 1688 primarily affected the Midlands. They probably played a key role in Commercial farming practices spreading from southeast England, but they did not start the process.
In reality, southeast England was already a Commercial society long before 1688. Technological innovations and leveraging the power of coal was far more important than 1688:
Greater parliamentary productivity means exactly what I said in my piece, passing more laws. I do think the mechanism is blindingly obvious. That doesn't mean (just because the mechanism is clear) that this channel was the only important thing.
I agree that the GR was only one stage on a longer road, and I think you're overstating the extent to which you disagree with any of the factual claims in my piece.
Thanks for the response. Why would I overstate my disagreement?
To be clear, I don’t dispute the facts of what happened in 18th Century Britain. It is your overall claim that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was a key cause of the Industrial Revolution. And I explain why in the linked article above.
And I am not the only one to reject that notion. There is now a substantial literature that either explicitly rejects the idea that the Glorious Revolution was the decisive cause of the Industrial Revolution or argues that its importance has been greatly overstated.
I doubt that the Industrial Revolution would have played out any differently if the GR had never taken place. And my guess is that much the same legislation would have been passed as well. The vast majority were private and local acts that the King would never have vetoed anyway.
I respect that view, and I'm aware of the literature you cited. Imagine the piece had not said 'and that made a difference for the Industrial Revolution', for a moment. Very little rides on that.
The key claim from my perspective is that the Estate, Enclosure, and Statutory Acts wouldn't have been passed without the GR, as we can see from the fact that they (a) were passed only very slowly before and (b) weren't passed in other countries until much later. Also, it's obvious how the GR led to the more of these Acts passing. And more generally, policy matters a lot to the level of output between countries, though of course geography, technology, and so on set much of the overall parameters.
And the even more key claim from my perspective is that the laws were passed in certain ways.
Reading this thread it struck me that there are two quite different causal stories in play here.
One concerns **coordination**: Parliament solved collective-action problems that fragmented property rights had previously made difficult to resolve.
The other concerns **constitutional change**: Parliament relocated decision rights from many customary claimants to a single authority, making decisions possible that previously required widespread consent.
Those are different mechanisms. The second may well produce greater efficiency, but it doesn't follow that it has solved the underlying conflict of interests.
If the key institutional innovation was increased legislative capacity to reallocate rights, then "markets were transformed before industrialisation" risks describing one consequence of a deeper constitutional shift rather than identifying the cause.
There may be productivity gains, but explaining them by saying Parliament 'fixed' property rights assumes the point at issue. An equally accurate description is that Parliament changed the allocation of authority and then observed a different economic equilibrium.
This was a really fascinating piece! As one other commenter mentioned, enclosure’s more common story in classrooms today is one of theft, and I had never considered the downstream benefits. If there’s any further reading on the subject that Kara or Ben could share, I’d love to read more!
The glorious revolution of 1688 should be considered the beginning of modernity not the French revolution (failed pseudo communist project) , but Napoleon was cool. And yes I judge history in an anacronistic way and with modern lenses etc etc
A system cannot adapt merely because resources can move within it. The rights that govern how those resources may be used, transferred, combined, or repurposed must also possess a governed form of mobility.
Property rights that are too weak discourage long-term investment. But rights that are perfectly secure yet impossible to reorganize can freeze a system into its inherited structure.
Institutional adaptation therefore requires two things at once: sufficiently stable rights, and a legitimate, bounded process for modifying the relations among those rights when circumstances change.
The deeper principle may be broader than property law: an adaptive system must permit not only changes of state, but governed changes to some of the rules by which state changes occur.
So this is a really interesting read, but I've read it a couple of times now and I keep finding myself getting frustrated with the argument, (albeit very much appreciate it raising so many interesting questions!), and I think it's because there are several different elements within it that are merged together? Which are, I think, state capacity to act; institutional safeguards; and political representation.
I think we'd all agree that the state needs enough capacity to make decisions despite fragmented interests that don't all align. Although we (probably?) also agree that safeguards like environmental reviews and judicial review exist for good reasons, since they protect public interests that governments might otherwise overlook. The balance between these two things is the core of the debate;
The problem isn't so much whether these safeguards exist (though maybe we should streamline them and they should be better and more cleanly designed) but more about who uses them and how well-resourced incumbent interests are often much better able to use them than future residents or those excluded from the housing market. The misuse of them also taints our trust in these safeguards, because we stop assuming that someone objecting through environmental review is making a legitimate environmental complaint, and assume they're just trying to represent their own private interests.
And if the safeguards were acting proportionately to the public interest, then we probably wouldn't have such beef with them, because we'd see a proportionate amount of projects actually taking place, whereas actually we're seeing billions of public money being wasted by being thwarted thanks to badly designed and implemented safeguarding mechanisms.
That's where the analogy to the Enclosure Acts kind of falls down for me, because the controversy wasn't simply about Parliament acting decisively, but more that they failed to recognise and fairly weigh up the customary rights and agency that people had over land and the long-term negative effects that this had on their livelihoods. (I don't think the Marxist historical narrative is wrong about this, although I do think they shot themselves in the foot by not giving adequate air time to the practical reasons around productivity that drove the decision in the first place. I think the authors here can do one better than that by recognising both sides!)
My read is that the challenge is more than just removing vetoes or building coalitions, and is more about designing systems that distinguish between legitimate public interests, incumbent private interests, and people who have no voice in the system but should.
I fully agree, Eleri. The word "productive" should always be followed by the question "for who?"
This article presents the plantation system as the solution for the problems of modernity, with its 'inefficient' individual property rights. It is an apologia not just for the transatlantic slave trade, but for the Irish potato famine, and the wars of the East India companies.
What is now critiqued as 'whiteness' and 'settler-colonialism' is mostly English and Dutch Protestant robber baron or carpet-bagger culture. There was two-way traffic between England and the Netherlands at the time the Separatists set out for Plymouth Rock, and fomented the regicide of Charles the First. New York was New Amsterdam first.
Kara and Ben, this article is an example of weaving a historical narrative in order to make unjustified claims on the present.
Firstly, this article neglects the upheaval of the English Civil War and its battles between monarch and Parliament. If Dutch Protestant rule was the necessary ingredient in the Industrial Revolution, that event presumably would have taken place in the Netherlands first.
Secondly, partible inheritance (gavelkind) was mostly practiced in the Jutish settlements of Kent and the Isle of Wight, whereas the Norman custom of primogeniture (oldest son takes all) was the standard in the rest of England. The reason for land being farmed in strips was that the plough did not have to be turned so often, compared to square plots. It had nothing to do with land ownership or inheritance, because most peasants didn't own the land they farmed in any case.
Thirdly, and most damning, I find your justification for land enclosure despicable. In the name of 'efficiency', the majority of subsistence farmers were pauperised, setting the model of exploitation which would be used in the transatlantic slave trade. That most landowners supported enclosure rather neglects the point that the non-landowners were paying for the robbery of common land.
As for using this political event of the so-called 'Glorious Revolution' as an example which will help us achieve greater efficiency today, I believe you are making a technocratic argument for a new era of colonisation. Solving infrastructure problems isn't as simple as riding roughshod over private property rights, as we have seen with the UK's ruinously expensive and pointless HS2 high speed rail project. I sincerely hope that you never achieve your political goals.
This piece highlights how The Enclosure Acts incentivized property owners to invest capital in their land, leading to material improvement in the land, basically a story of the industrial revolution as one of capital and land.
In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi also points to The Enclosure Acts in England as the birthplace of modern capitalism. However he thinks the creation of a labor *market* was the main revolutionary act. Prior to the enclosures, English peasants did not depend on a labor market to survive. Polanyi argues that the common rights acted as a non-market social safety net. Because people could sustain themselves directly off the land, they were "embedded" in a social structure, not an economic one.
To avoid starvation, the dispossessed population now had to migrate to towns and factories to sell the only thing they had left—their physical capacity to work. Polanyi argues that this is how a "labor market" was originally formed. A new, geographically mobile, large working class completely dependent on the market for their very survival.
-----------
I am curious what you think about this side of the enclosures, or if you've previously read Polanyi's work? IMO the stories aren't mutually exclusive, but I find it odd that changing incentives for developing farmland would be seen as the key ingredient for the industrial revolution when the 19th century coincided with a transition away from agricultural autarky and towards relying primarily on imported calories.
The only thing I know a lot about is how these particular laws got passed. The piece was meant to be about the tricks and tools that allowed the laws to get through: high legitimacy through a landowner parliament; buyins for those affected. The birth of modern capitalism is more of a hook, which I think is defensible but a bit more fuzzily.
So take this as being what I reckon, but I am happy to be shown to be wrong on this particular element: my understanding is that the increase of waged labour was pretty steady from much deeper, and many workers were already paid wages in the 1300s. I’m not sure that enclosure led to fewer smallholders, but if it did that was only a contributory factor.
Loved this piece.
Thank you!
When I took a gen ed history course in Freshman year if undergrad, this topic was taught as the evil capitalists stealing commons from the commoners (enclosure acts). Afaict no mention of the downside of the open system was made, nor any mention of the benefits of consolidation and helped usher in the Industrial Revolution
I think the downsides were probably real (though in certain respects exaggerated: it's often made out like EVERYONE had claims on the commons, but it was usually strictly regulated to avoid the tragedy of the commons), but the upsides of enclosure are rarely discussed.
As a college history major I stumbled into a course taught by (I later realized) one of the department's sidelined profs whose work was ignored by the others. He had no TAs assigned to him, etc. The course was on the "Economic History of Europe" and turned out to be eye opening precisely because he, though not an economist, insisted that we consider the practical economics of things like enclosure. I didn't then understand why that perspective was considered eccentric, but anyway actual human history started making way more sense. Still does.
This reminds me of Michael Heller's 2008 book 'The Gridlock Economy.' On a wider note, though, we do tend to forget just how much rests on really basic things like adequate infrastructure. This is particularly true for anywhere more than a few miles or km from the coast or a serious river port. You could be the best entrepreneur in the world in mediaeval England, and your ambitions would likely be limited to selling turnips locally unless you lived in a port city that could trade with other port cities. As one of the Scottish kings put it, the interior landscape (specifically, that of the Kingdom of Fife in his telling) was a "beggar's mantle fringed with gold."
Thanks for sharing that book, I'll look into it.
I think that you are greatly exaggerating the importance of the Glorious Revolution. Most of the factors that you mentioned were not direct outcomes of the political events of 1688. Just because something happened after 1688, does not mean that the Glorious Revolution caused it.
For a more balanced history, I would read this:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/rethinking-the-glorious-revolution
Very interesting hypothesis – I'll check it out. I agree that post hoc does not imply propter hoc, but I think in this case the mechanism is absolutely straightforward and blindingly obvious: greater parliamentary productivity and legitimacy. A committee of landowners fixed land problems.
"Blindingly obvious" is hyperbole, not evidence. And I do not know what "greater parliamentary productivity" means.
In particular, I think that you greatly overstate the impact of post-1688 parliamentary enclosures on agricultural productivity. And agriculture was only one factor on British industrialization.
Agriculture in southeast England was high in productivity long before 1688. Farmers in southeast England copied Commercial farming practices pioneered in Flanders and the Netherlands long before that date. Robert Allen has shown that increase in agricultural productivity are clearly in evidence 1450–1550 and were even stronger in the next century.
Parliamentary enclosures after 1688 primarily affected the Midlands. They probably played a key role in Commercial farming practices spreading from southeast England, but they did not start the process.
In reality, southeast England was already a Commercial society long before 1688. Technological innovations and leveraging the power of coal was far more important than 1688:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/another-way-at-looking-at-pre-industrial
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-british-industrial-revolution
Greater parliamentary productivity means exactly what I said in my piece, passing more laws. I do think the mechanism is blindingly obvious. That doesn't mean (just because the mechanism is clear) that this channel was the only important thing.
I agree that the GR was only one stage on a longer road, and I think you're overstating the extent to which you disagree with any of the factual claims in my piece.
Thanks for the response. Why would I overstate my disagreement?
To be clear, I don’t dispute the facts of what happened in 18th Century Britain. It is your overall claim that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was a key cause of the Industrial Revolution. And I explain why in the linked article above.
And I am not the only one to reject that notion. There is now a substantial literature that either explicitly rejects the idea that the Glorious Revolution was the decisive cause of the Industrial Revolution or argues that its importance has been greatly overstated.
I doubt that the Industrial Revolution would have played out any differently if the GR had never taken place. And my guess is that much the same legislation would have been passed as well. The vast majority were private and local acts that the King would never have vetoed anyway.
I respect that view, and I'm aware of the literature you cited. Imagine the piece had not said 'and that made a difference for the Industrial Revolution', for a moment. Very little rides on that.
The key claim from my perspective is that the Estate, Enclosure, and Statutory Acts wouldn't have been passed without the GR, as we can see from the fact that they (a) were passed only very slowly before and (b) weren't passed in other countries until much later. Also, it's obvious how the GR led to the more of these Acts passing. And more generally, policy matters a lot to the level of output between countries, though of course geography, technology, and so on set much of the overall parameters.
And the even more key claim from my perspective is that the laws were passed in certain ways.
Thanks for the clarification.
I largely agree with the article if it were stripped of references to:
1) the Industrial Revolution (particularly in the title)
2) the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as a cause, and
3) the implicit assumption that pre-1688 England was similar to the rest of Europe in the "Multiple Scleroses' section,
Then this would make the article a factual history of the post-1688 Estate, Enclosure, and Statutory Acts without implying causality of #1 and #2.
Reading this thread it struck me that there are two quite different causal stories in play here.
One concerns **coordination**: Parliament solved collective-action problems that fragmented property rights had previously made difficult to resolve.
The other concerns **constitutional change**: Parliament relocated decision rights from many customary claimants to a single authority, making decisions possible that previously required widespread consent.
Those are different mechanisms. The second may well produce greater efficiency, but it doesn't follow that it has solved the underlying conflict of interests.
If the key institutional innovation was increased legislative capacity to reallocate rights, then "markets were transformed before industrialisation" risks describing one consequence of a deeper constitutional shift rather than identifying the cause.
There may be productivity gains, but explaining them by saying Parliament 'fixed' property rights assumes the point at issue. An equally accurate description is that Parliament changed the allocation of authority and then observed a different economic equilibrium.
This was a really fascinating piece! As one other commenter mentioned, enclosure’s more common story in classrooms today is one of theft, and I had never considered the downstream benefits. If there’s any further reading on the subject that Kara or Ben could share, I’d love to read more!
There is so much. Kara would give a better answer than me! It is easy to find the leftist/Marxist social history version via Google. The economic history is in the links I put above, plus the work of Bogart and Richardson, e.g. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w15697/w15697.pdf & https://www.economics.uci.edu/files/docs/faculty_review/bogart_richardson_2008a_nberw13757.pdf. Also https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/chrono.pdf.
This was a fun read! Thank you so much!
Thank you so much for this lovely article!
Thank you so much for this lovely comment!
A title I can’t scroll past!
A SLIGHTLY exaggerated title, but I think the piece is worth it anyway!
The glorious revolution of 1688 should be considered the beginning of modernity not the French revolution (failed pseudo communist project) , but Napoleon was cool. And yes I judge history in an anacronistic way and with modern lenses etc etc
A system cannot adapt merely because resources can move within it. The rights that govern how those resources may be used, transferred, combined, or repurposed must also possess a governed form of mobility.
Property rights that are too weak discourage long-term investment. But rights that are perfectly secure yet impossible to reorganize can freeze a system into its inherited structure.
Institutional adaptation therefore requires two things at once: sufficiently stable rights, and a legitimate, bounded process for modifying the relations among those rights when circumstances change.
The deeper principle may be broader than property law: an adaptive system must permit not only changes of state, but governed changes to some of the rules by which state changes occur.
So this is a really interesting read, but I've read it a couple of times now and I keep finding myself getting frustrated with the argument, (albeit very much appreciate it raising so many interesting questions!), and I think it's because there are several different elements within it that are merged together? Which are, I think, state capacity to act; institutional safeguards; and political representation.
I think we'd all agree that the state needs enough capacity to make decisions despite fragmented interests that don't all align. Although we (probably?) also agree that safeguards like environmental reviews and judicial review exist for good reasons, since they protect public interests that governments might otherwise overlook. The balance between these two things is the core of the debate;
The problem isn't so much whether these safeguards exist (though maybe we should streamline them and they should be better and more cleanly designed) but more about who uses them and how well-resourced incumbent interests are often much better able to use them than future residents or those excluded from the housing market. The misuse of them also taints our trust in these safeguards, because we stop assuming that someone objecting through environmental review is making a legitimate environmental complaint, and assume they're just trying to represent their own private interests.
And if the safeguards were acting proportionately to the public interest, then we probably wouldn't have such beef with them, because we'd see a proportionate amount of projects actually taking place, whereas actually we're seeing billions of public money being wasted by being thwarted thanks to badly designed and implemented safeguarding mechanisms.
That's where the analogy to the Enclosure Acts kind of falls down for me, because the controversy wasn't simply about Parliament acting decisively, but more that they failed to recognise and fairly weigh up the customary rights and agency that people had over land and the long-term negative effects that this had on their livelihoods. (I don't think the Marxist historical narrative is wrong about this, although I do think they shot themselves in the foot by not giving adequate air time to the practical reasons around productivity that drove the decision in the first place. I think the authors here can do one better than that by recognising both sides!)
My read is that the challenge is more than just removing vetoes or building coalitions, and is more about designing systems that distinguish between legitimate public interests, incumbent private interests, and people who have no voice in the system but should.
I fully agree, Eleri. The word "productive" should always be followed by the question "for who?"
This article presents the plantation system as the solution for the problems of modernity, with its 'inefficient' individual property rights. It is an apologia not just for the transatlantic slave trade, but for the Irish potato famine, and the wars of the East India companies.
What is now critiqued as 'whiteness' and 'settler-colonialism' is mostly English and Dutch Protestant robber baron or carpet-bagger culture. There was two-way traffic between England and the Netherlands at the time the Separatists set out for Plymouth Rock, and fomented the regicide of Charles the First. New York was New Amsterdam first.
Is India a modern counter example of a country that won’t meet its potential because it is seemingly unable to reform land laws?
My understanding is that reform hasn’t been followed in other states holding progress back.
Agree, yes, that's a core problem for India.
Just look at the success the (Eastern) Punjab had when it consolidated farmer land in 1947!
Kara and Ben, this article is an example of weaving a historical narrative in order to make unjustified claims on the present.
Firstly, this article neglects the upheaval of the English Civil War and its battles between monarch and Parliament. If Dutch Protestant rule was the necessary ingredient in the Industrial Revolution, that event presumably would have taken place in the Netherlands first.
Secondly, partible inheritance (gavelkind) was mostly practiced in the Jutish settlements of Kent and the Isle of Wight, whereas the Norman custom of primogeniture (oldest son takes all) was the standard in the rest of England. The reason for land being farmed in strips was that the plough did not have to be turned so often, compared to square plots. It had nothing to do with land ownership or inheritance, because most peasants didn't own the land they farmed in any case.
Thirdly, and most damning, I find your justification for land enclosure despicable. In the name of 'efficiency', the majority of subsistence farmers were pauperised, setting the model of exploitation which would be used in the transatlantic slave trade. That most landowners supported enclosure rather neglects the point that the non-landowners were paying for the robbery of common land.
As for using this political event of the so-called 'Glorious Revolution' as an example which will help us achieve greater efficiency today, I believe you are making a technocratic argument for a new era of colonisation. Solving infrastructure problems isn't as simple as riding roughshod over private property rights, as we have seen with the UK's ruinously expensive and pointless HS2 high speed rail project. I sincerely hope that you never achieve your political goals.
This is so so good
So kind – delighted you enjoyed it!
An extraordinary read which shows how our roads and rivers were once the envy of the world.
This piece highlights how The Enclosure Acts incentivized property owners to invest capital in their land, leading to material improvement in the land, basically a story of the industrial revolution as one of capital and land.
In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi also points to The Enclosure Acts in England as the birthplace of modern capitalism. However he thinks the creation of a labor *market* was the main revolutionary act. Prior to the enclosures, English peasants did not depend on a labor market to survive. Polanyi argues that the common rights acted as a non-market social safety net. Because people could sustain themselves directly off the land, they were "embedded" in a social structure, not an economic one.
To avoid starvation, the dispossessed population now had to migrate to towns and factories to sell the only thing they had left—their physical capacity to work. Polanyi argues that this is how a "labor market" was originally formed. A new, geographically mobile, large working class completely dependent on the market for their very survival.
-----------
I am curious what you think about this side of the enclosures, or if you've previously read Polanyi's work? IMO the stories aren't mutually exclusive, but I find it odd that changing incentives for developing farmland would be seen as the key ingredient for the industrial revolution when the 19th century coincided with a transition away from agricultural autarky and towards relying primarily on imported calories.
The only thing I know a lot about is how these particular laws got passed. The piece was meant to be about the tricks and tools that allowed the laws to get through: high legitimacy through a landowner parliament; buyins for those affected. The birth of modern capitalism is more of a hook, which I think is defensible but a bit more fuzzily.
So take this as being what I reckon, but I am happy to be shown to be wrong on this particular element: my understanding is that the increase of waged labour was pretty steady from much deeper, and many workers were already paid wages in the 1300s. I’m not sure that enclosure led to fewer smallholders, but if it did that was only a contributory factor.