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The War against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism
A unique historical account of poor peoples’ self-defence strategies in the face of the plunder of their lands and labor
For five centuries, the development of capitalism has been inextricably connected to the expropriation of working people from the land they depended on for subsistence. Through ruling class assaults known as enclosures or clearances, shared common land became privately-owned capital, and peasant farmers became propertyless laborers who could only survive by working for the owners of land or capital.
As Ian Angus documents in The War Against the Commons , mass opposition to dispossession has never ceased. His dramatic account provides new insights into an opposition that ranged from stubborn non-compliance to open rebellion, including eyewitness accounts of campaigns in which thousands of protestors tore down fences and restored common access to pastures and forests. Such movements, he shows, led to the Diggers’ call for a new society based on shared ownership and use of the land, an appeal that was more sophisticated and radical than anything else written before the 1800s.
Contrary to many accounts that treat the reorganization of agriculture as a purely domestic matter, Angus shows that there were close connections between the enclosures in Britain and imperial expansion. The consolidation of some of the largest estates in England and Scotland was directly financed by the forced labor of African slaves and the colonial plunder of India.
This unique historical account of ruling class robbery and poor peoples’ resistance offers answers to key questions about the history of capitalism. Was enclosure a “necessary evil” that enabled economic growth? What role did deliberate promotion of hunger play in the creation of the working class? How did Marx and Engels view the separation of workers from the land, and how does resistance to enclosure continue in the 21st century?
For five centuries, the development of capitalism has been inextricably connected to the expropriation of working people from the land they depended on for subsistence. Through ruling class assaults known as enclosures or clearances, shared common land became privately-owned capital, and peasant farmers became propertyless laborers who could only survive by working for the owners of land or capital.
As Ian Angus documents in The War Against the Commons , mass opposition to dispossession has never ceased. His dramatic account provides new insights into an opposition that ranged from stubborn non-compliance to open rebellion, including eyewitness accounts of campaigns in which thousands of protestors tore down fences and restored common access to pastures and forests. Such movements, he shows, led to the Diggers’ call for a new society based on shared ownership and use of the land, an appeal that was more sophisticated and radical than anything else written before the 1800s.
Contrary to many accounts that treat the reorganization of agriculture as a purely domestic matter, Angus shows that there were close connections between the enclosures in Britain and imperial expansion. The consolidation of some of the largest estates in England and Scotland was directly financed by the forced labor of African slaves and the colonial plunder of India.
This unique historical account of ruling class robbery and poor peoples’ resistance offers answers to key questions about the history of capitalism. Was enclosure a “necessary evil” that enabled economic growth? What role did deliberate promotion of hunger play in the creation of the working class? How did Marx and Engels view the separation of workers from the land, and how does resistance to enclosure continue in the 21st century?
248 pages, Paperback
Published May 2, 2023
9 people are currently reading
305 people want to read
About the author
Ian Angus
59 books29 followersIan Angus is a Canadian independent Marxist writer, educator, and ecosocialist activist.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 15, 2023
The skilful linking of historical processes to contemporary political and ecological struggles is a great strength of Angus' book. This is not specifically a work of history, but rather a framing of the current ecological crisis within the wider historic development of capitalism and the destruction of the commons. For Angus it is capitalism's transformation of the commons that is emblematic of the system's method of operation. But looking backward can only tell us so much, the alternative has to be a new way of organising society based on the creation of a new society with the idea of common, democratic ownership at its heart.
Full review on the blog: http://resolutereader.blogspot.com/20...
Full review on the blog: http://resolutereader.blogspot.com/20...
May 10, 2023
A terrific, important book. Other authors have written about this history, but Ian Angus’s new book stands out for the refreshing candidness of his worldview, his obvious mastery of the topic and his gift for poignant summary.
The War Against the Commons vividly retells the story of how land that had been shared for centuries was privatised by force and deception in England, Wales and Scotland. This war against the agricultural commons – known as enclosure in England – lasted hundreds of years and displaced millions. The same process in Scotland is known as clearance.
Enclosure led to the creation of large estates owned by a small elite. This spurred the development of agrarian capitalist enterprise. But enclosure also forcibly created a new class of landless people who could no longer support themselves but had to sell their labour power to survive.
Wherever enclosure took place it was met by the fierce resistance of the commoners who sought to maintain their customary rights and access to common lands.
This popular resistance took many forms over the centuries. There were large armed revolts involving thousands. There were physical attacks on unpopular landlords or their property. Some repeatedly levelled and burned the enclosers hedges, dykes and fences. Other commoners engaged in long-lasting guerilla-style campaigns to steal or kill the livestock that had been placed on former common lands.
The landlords were brutal in defense of their stolen property. During the 1700s, England’s landlord-dominated parliament passed numerous laws that legalised enclosure and criminalised dissent against enclosure. The Black Acts of 1723 created more than 200 new capital offenses. The death penalty applied even to stealing a sheep, felling a tree, killing a deer or poaching a rabbit.
Despite the book’s focus on England and Scotland, Angus does not agree that the origins of capitalism can be understood as an internal British affair. Capitalist development in Britain is closely bound up with Britain’s colonial conquests overseas. Angus says the enclosure process “could not have happened so quickly or thoroughly without the imperial wealth that slave traders, plantation owners, and colonial profiteers invested in British estates”.
Further, Angus says that early British agrarian capitalism would likely have never matured without the mass import of agricultural foodstuffs from the colonies or the outward migration of surplus landless labourers to a New World bloodily cleared of many of its original inhabitants.
This means the dispossession of English and Scottish rural labourers and their transformation into the first modern working class was made possible by the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia, the labour of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and the undisguised plunder of the Indian subcontinent. Angus’s argument accords with Karl Marx’s, who said in Capital that “the veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal”.
It is very much worth retelling this story now because it proves false the most powerful ideological justification of the current system: that capitalism is natural and rational. It’s also a critical time to revisit and rethink this history because capitalism’s never-ending war on the commons is accelerating today, on a far wider scale.
The War Against the Commons vividly retells the story of how land that had been shared for centuries was privatised by force and deception in England, Wales and Scotland. This war against the agricultural commons – known as enclosure in England – lasted hundreds of years and displaced millions. The same process in Scotland is known as clearance.
Enclosure led to the creation of large estates owned by a small elite. This spurred the development of agrarian capitalist enterprise. But enclosure also forcibly created a new class of landless people who could no longer support themselves but had to sell their labour power to survive.
“For wage-labour to triumph, there had to be large numbers of people for whom self-provisioning was no longer an option. The transition, which began in England in the 1400s, involved the elimination of not only shared use of the land, but of the common rights that had allowed even the poorest people access to essential means of subsistence. The right to hunt or fish for food, to gather wood and edible plants, to glean leftover grain in the fields after harvest, to pasture a cow or two on undeveloped land – those and more common rights were erased, replaced by the exclusive right of property owners to use the Earth’s wealth.”
Wherever enclosure took place it was met by the fierce resistance of the commoners who sought to maintain their customary rights and access to common lands.
This popular resistance took many forms over the centuries. There were large armed revolts involving thousands. There were physical attacks on unpopular landlords or their property. Some repeatedly levelled and burned the enclosers hedges, dykes and fences. Other commoners engaged in long-lasting guerilla-style campaigns to steal or kill the livestock that had been placed on former common lands.
The landlords were brutal in defense of their stolen property. During the 1700s, England’s landlord-dominated parliament passed numerous laws that legalised enclosure and criminalised dissent against enclosure. The Black Acts of 1723 created more than 200 new capital offenses. The death penalty applied even to stealing a sheep, felling a tree, killing a deer or poaching a rabbit.
Despite the book’s focus on England and Scotland, Angus does not agree that the origins of capitalism can be understood as an internal British affair. Capitalist development in Britain is closely bound up with Britain’s colonial conquests overseas. Angus says the enclosure process “could not have happened so quickly or thoroughly without the imperial wealth that slave traders, plantation owners, and colonial profiteers invested in British estates”.
Further, Angus says that early British agrarian capitalism would likely have never matured without the mass import of agricultural foodstuffs from the colonies or the outward migration of surplus landless labourers to a New World bloodily cleared of many of its original inhabitants.
This means the dispossession of English and Scottish rural labourers and their transformation into the first modern working class was made possible by the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia, the labour of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and the undisguised plunder of the Indian subcontinent. Angus’s argument accords with Karl Marx’s, who said in Capital that “the veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal”.
It is very much worth retelling this story now because it proves false the most powerful ideological justification of the current system: that capitalism is natural and rational. It’s also a critical time to revisit and rethink this history because capitalism’s never-ending war on the commons is accelerating today, on a far wider scale.
July 18, 2023
In the footsteps of some great scholars exploring the origins of capital, Angus offers a history through the expropriations of the commons in Britain to the land-grabs worldwide today. Well written and evenly paced, Angus shows why this is a major issue today in our efforts to secure a livable future.
February 29, 2024
A short, straightforward, deeply informative history of the beginnings of capitalism. I've read about and taught about "the enclosure movement" in Great Britain before, and its place in the development of modern global capitalism, but there was so much specific detail in this book--particularly its excavations of the ruminations of the late Marx, and how they can help socialists see better the relationship between socialism and an economy of common resources (especially agricultural ones)--that I can't imagine I'll ever teach this part of the history of ideas the same way again. It would be interesting to put this book alongside other similar books that made a much bigger splash--Sven Beckerts's Empire of Cotton, for example--and allow leftist economic historians really go at it over whether sheep or cotton (or something else!) was really the root cause the global exploitation and ruination of communities that the United Kingdom, more than any other 18th-century state, used to define the economy of the contemporary world. But that's probably an unresolvable argument, and not important for Angus's point here: that capitalism required the creation of a laboring class, that the laboring class was created by dispossessing them of the common land and resources that they used to build lives of subsistence for themselves, and that while there were always occasional individuals to delighted in that kind of forced urbanization and migration, most people fought hard, and futilely, to hold on to that which they'd managed in common for centuries.
July 28, 2023
This book from Ian Angus presents the history of the centuries-long process of dispossession and theft from which contemporary global capitalism emerged. Against the grain of teleological and whiggish histories, Angus highlights in particular the resistance that met each wave of the enclosures in England and Scotland.
Carefully researched and concisely argued, The War Against the Commons demolishes the fairy tale that capitalism triumphed because it corresponded with “human nature.” On the contrary, the removal and criminalization of long-held common rights was met with petitions and pitchforks – legal appeals when possible, and direct action when necessary – and this fierce opposition was only defeated through imprisonment, torture, exile, and execution.
As Angus notes, “The idea that individuals could claim exclusive ownership of parts of nature on which all humans depend was very weird indeed.” Blood and fire were required to establish the dominance of capitalist property relations, and the criminalization of the basic rights to use common lands for subsistence food and energy needs was required to establish the dominance of capitalist labour relations.
This is a history, primarily, of the enclosures and the resistance they faced in England and Scotland from the 16th to the 19th centuries. But as any proper origin story of global capitalism must be, it’s a history that includes the central role of imperial plunder, famine, and slavery from South Asia to the Caribbean. The profits stolen from South Asia, Africa, and the West Indies – extracted at the cost of super-exploitation, starvation, and mass death – were central to the formation of England’s large landowning class as it cleared and enclosed the commons and consolidated power.
Tragically, much of the history Angus documents is little known – and the larger story is largely misunderstood, thanks in no small part to the ubiquity of Garrett Hardin’s ahistorical tract, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” In a world in which the violent enclosures of capitalist accumulation continue with destructive consequences, The War Against the Commons is a comprehensive and overdue rebuttal.
Carefully researched and concisely argued, The War Against the Commons demolishes the fairy tale that capitalism triumphed because it corresponded with “human nature.” On the contrary, the removal and criminalization of long-held common rights was met with petitions and pitchforks – legal appeals when possible, and direct action when necessary – and this fierce opposition was only defeated through imprisonment, torture, exile, and execution.
As Angus notes, “The idea that individuals could claim exclusive ownership of parts of nature on which all humans depend was very weird indeed.” Blood and fire were required to establish the dominance of capitalist property relations, and the criminalization of the basic rights to use common lands for subsistence food and energy needs was required to establish the dominance of capitalist labour relations.
This is a history, primarily, of the enclosures and the resistance they faced in England and Scotland from the 16th to the 19th centuries. But as any proper origin story of global capitalism must be, it’s a history that includes the central role of imperial plunder, famine, and slavery from South Asia to the Caribbean. The profits stolen from South Asia, Africa, and the West Indies – extracted at the cost of super-exploitation, starvation, and mass death – were central to the formation of England’s large landowning class as it cleared and enclosed the commons and consolidated power.
Tragically, much of the history Angus documents is little known – and the larger story is largely misunderstood, thanks in no small part to the ubiquity of Garrett Hardin’s ahistorical tract, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” In a world in which the violent enclosures of capitalist accumulation continue with destructive consequences, The War Against the Commons is a comprehensive and overdue rebuttal.
July 23, 2023
workers of all countries unite
This is a fantastic book showing the brutality of capitalism from its beginning to the present and the hidden history of struggle against it highly recommended
This is a fantastic book showing the brutality of capitalism from its beginning to the present and the hidden history of struggle against it highly recommended
August 20, 2023
An accessible marxist history of enclosure, or theft of "commons" land in Britain over centuries that also considers current land rights campaigns. Angus deals directly with Karl Marx’s work on the origins and development of Capitalism in his great work Capital. The first appendix considers the meaning of Marx’s phrase from Capital, “So-called primitive accumulation” in a clear, interesting piece. The second is on Marx, Engels and what they said about Russia’s peasant communes and the third appendix is a statement from La Via Campesina International Peasants Movement.
Common land was straightforwardly stolen by enclosure by usually larger landowners at various times across Britain. But there was also a long process of the accumulative denial of traditional rights that made ordinary people’s lives so hard that most were forced off the land to find better lives elsewhere. Gathering fallen wood for fuel became theft from privatised woods. Hunting deer, snaring rabbits and catching fish from the local river became poaching with vicious violence used against people whose major source of meat had been from hunting.
These processes were legal in the sense that they were imposed by a system run by the ruling class for the ruling class. Ordinary people resisted the enclosures collectively and fought off the thefts, which is why the peasantry took so long to be finally defeated. Some of these battles were only won by the ruling class with thousands of foreign mercenaries.
Angus shows how the accompanying ideological campaign for enclosures said it was necessary to make land more productive, to prevent starvation. I remember being told this when we learned about 17th century agriculturist Jetho Tull and his seed drills in primary school when I was nine. Therefore, the argument went, the displacement of people was all very unfortunate but unavoidable, except as Angus shows this wasn’t necessarily true. Old systems of strip farming and rotations of different crops and manuring were often very productive. There are some interesting parallels here with giant industrial farming and feedlot corporations insisting that only they can feed the ever increasing population. That isn’t true either, the world population isn’t endlessly expanding and their systems don’t feed people, they feed people who can afford to access food produced to maximise profit. Mostly only well off people can access good quality, healthy food all the time and globally they are very much in the minority. The final chapter is therefore appropriately on the struggle for land rights now, with the famous Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil and other campaigns struggling for agroecology of which food sovereignty is such an important part.
The book shows how the current system where most land and capital is owned by a very few and the vast majority of the rest of us own nothing but our ability to labour is a relatively recent development in human history. Capitalism isn’t eternal and like every other system of production humans have lived under, it will end at some point. With that in mind, it leaves me thinking about a question for people who want to get rid of capitalism. What relationship with land are we fighting for and how will we produce our food? Millions of people are involved in that question. As Angus says, “Today’s movement of the oppressed and dispossessed to steal back the commons offer real hope that capitalism’s five-century war against the commons can be defeated and reversed in our time.”
Common land was straightforwardly stolen by enclosure by usually larger landowners at various times across Britain. But there was also a long process of the accumulative denial of traditional rights that made ordinary people’s lives so hard that most were forced off the land to find better lives elsewhere. Gathering fallen wood for fuel became theft from privatised woods. Hunting deer, snaring rabbits and catching fish from the local river became poaching with vicious violence used against people whose major source of meat had been from hunting.
These processes were legal in the sense that they were imposed by a system run by the ruling class for the ruling class. Ordinary people resisted the enclosures collectively and fought off the thefts, which is why the peasantry took so long to be finally defeated. Some of these battles were only won by the ruling class with thousands of foreign mercenaries.
Angus shows how the accompanying ideological campaign for enclosures said it was necessary to make land more productive, to prevent starvation. I remember being told this when we learned about 17th century agriculturist Jetho Tull and his seed drills in primary school when I was nine. Therefore, the argument went, the displacement of people was all very unfortunate but unavoidable, except as Angus shows this wasn’t necessarily true. Old systems of strip farming and rotations of different crops and manuring were often very productive. There are some interesting parallels here with giant industrial farming and feedlot corporations insisting that only they can feed the ever increasing population. That isn’t true either, the world population isn’t endlessly expanding and their systems don’t feed people, they feed people who can afford to access food produced to maximise profit. Mostly only well off people can access good quality, healthy food all the time and globally they are very much in the minority. The final chapter is therefore appropriately on the struggle for land rights now, with the famous Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil and other campaigns struggling for agroecology of which food sovereignty is such an important part.
The book shows how the current system where most land and capital is owned by a very few and the vast majority of the rest of us own nothing but our ability to labour is a relatively recent development in human history. Capitalism isn’t eternal and like every other system of production humans have lived under, it will end at some point. With that in mind, it leaves me thinking about a question for people who want to get rid of capitalism. What relationship with land are we fighting for and how will we produce our food? Millions of people are involved in that question. As Angus says, “Today’s movement of the oppressed and dispossessed to steal back the commons offer real hope that capitalism’s five-century war against the commons can be defeated and reversed in our time.”
October 17, 2024
A fascinating history from below that focuses on fierce peasant resistance to enclosures, and the ways the ruling classes struck down on this resistance through legal/punitive means over centuries to force through the privatisation of land and its resources.
This kind of radical history is completely obscured in Britain and it was inspiring to learn about all the revolts that took place and where. Depressingly but tellingly the site of the Diggers' (a proto-communist commoners movement) occupation at St George's Hill in Surrey is now a gated community with golf and tennis clubs.
One striking part of the book for me was a bit that dealt with the oft-peddled view that enclosures improved agricultural efficiency, helping meet the needs of a growing population. (Part and parcel of a more general view that the transition to capitalism improved "efficiency"). While the argument that commons-based agriculture was just as technologically progressive felt slightly underdeveloped (but maybe I'm under the influence of enclosure-ideology), the key point that England went from a country that in the early 1700s both fed its population and exported food, to one that was heavily dependent on imported food (mainly from its colonies) in the 1800s gives the lie to the idea that any improvement in efficiency was for the sake of food security for the general population, and not enhanced profits for the few.
Relatedly I appreciated how the author connected enclosures in Britain to colonial conquest (including the forced transformation of agricultural land in British colonies - another form of enclosure), both in terms of the amassing of stolen imperial wealth that sustained the consolidation of private land, and in terms of creating a "way out" for dispossessed English and Scottish surplus labour via emigration to the colonies (through the violent dispossession of Indigenous people in the Americas and Australia).
One last thing that struck me was the animosity towards sheep of the commoners and their defenders. I just hadn't realised how much common land and fields and settlements had been effectively destroyed to make way for lucrative sheep pasture. Now every time I pass through the British countryside by train, I don't think I can view the grazing sheep in the same way again.
This kind of radical history is completely obscured in Britain and it was inspiring to learn about all the revolts that took place and where. Depressingly but tellingly the site of the Diggers' (a proto-communist commoners movement) occupation at St George's Hill in Surrey is now a gated community with golf and tennis clubs.
One striking part of the book for me was a bit that dealt with the oft-peddled view that enclosures improved agricultural efficiency, helping meet the needs of a growing population. (Part and parcel of a more general view that the transition to capitalism improved "efficiency"). While the argument that commons-based agriculture was just as technologically progressive felt slightly underdeveloped (but maybe I'm under the influence of enclosure-ideology), the key point that England went from a country that in the early 1700s both fed its population and exported food, to one that was heavily dependent on imported food (mainly from its colonies) in the 1800s gives the lie to the idea that any improvement in efficiency was for the sake of food security for the general population, and not enhanced profits for the few.
Relatedly I appreciated how the author connected enclosures in Britain to colonial conquest (including the forced transformation of agricultural land in British colonies - another form of enclosure), both in terms of the amassing of stolen imperial wealth that sustained the consolidation of private land, and in terms of creating a "way out" for dispossessed English and Scottish surplus labour via emigration to the colonies (through the violent dispossession of Indigenous people in the Americas and Australia).
One last thing that struck me was the animosity towards sheep of the commoners and their defenders. I just hadn't realised how much common land and fields and settlements had been effectively destroyed to make way for lucrative sheep pasture. Now every time I pass through the British countryside by train, I don't think I can view the grazing sheep in the same way again.
July 18, 2025
This book is an outstanding history of commons enclosures in Great Britain starting in the 15th Century:
I like to quote Aimé Césaire describing the rise of fascism as Western imperialism coming home to roost:
But I now see that's incomplete. Western imperialism's methods were devised and perfected at home, there was no need for it to return.
This is the story of an essential part of the rise of capitalism—the forced separation of working people from the means of subsistence, especially the land itself, a separation achieved by robbery, violence, fraud, and worse. The expropriators used hunger to force the poor to work in their fields, mines, and factories—and the poor fought back with every weapon they had. It is a story written, as Marx said, in letters of blood and fire.
I like to quote Aimé Césaire describing the rise of fascism as Western imperialism coming home to roost:
People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind—it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.
But I now see that's incomplete. Western imperialism's methods were devised and perfected at home, there was no need for it to return.
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.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back
July 1, 2023
This book should be essential reading for anyone concerned about the way the British people have, over centuries, been dispossessed of what were originally common holdings of land. It also emphasises the continued, if unsuccessful, resistance to that dispossession. Angus writes clearly and concisely and backs up his arguments with factual evidence from the historical record. A fascinating and informative read!
March 15, 2024
I would have a lot to write on this excellent book, but there are already excellent reviews here, so I will just say that it is an excellent historical complement to marxist theory (regarding the "so-called 'primitive' accumulation"). If you want also to break common misconceptions about the advent of capitalism, it is a must-read. Even the appendixes are an excellent read.
Just go and read it!
Just go and read it!
November 3, 2023
Concise and powerful. Angus shows how capitalism was birthed and continues to survive on the expropriation of common land and the dispossession of those who depend on it for their subsistence. This is a highly-readable and indispensable introduction to this line of economic and social history.
March 29, 2024
If capitalism is such a natural outcome of human nature, why were systematic violence and draconian laws necessary to establish it? And if greed is the primary motivation for human beings, how could the vast majority of human existence have been in hunter-gatherer societies in which cooperation was the most valuable behavior?
Forced removal from the land, elimination of access to common lands and putting an end to the ability to live without working for others was essential for capitalism to develop. To demonstrate this, Ian Angus’ book concentrates on the enclosures in England and the clearances in Scotland. The book is forthright about the violent details as they unfolded from the 15th century through to the Industrial Revolution. England and Scotland were overwhelmingly populated by farmers, much as the rest of the world. Although there was wage work, very few were dependent on it and only under capitalism did mass reliance on wage work occur.
Forcing this reliance on wage work, and the massive exploitation associated with it, is central to the story. We are not spared the details of draconian 16th century legislation that mandated brandings with iron, whippings and death for those who refused an offer of work, and jail for anyone who offered or accepted wages higher than those set by local employers. Lest we think such laws were only in the distant past, Ian Angus reminds us that more than 4,000 enclosure acts were passed by Parliament from 1730 to 1840; these and other laws were implemented to force people into working in the new factories of the Industrial Revolution.
That such draconian laws were repeatedly passed over long periods of time demonstrate that capitalism is not “natural” and indeed could only be imposed by force, War Against the Commons persuasively demonstrates. This is a book that is useful for those already acquainted with this bloody history and wish to obtain more knowledge, including of the still largely unknown Winstanley and the Diggers movement, but also for those without this knowledge who wish to learn about the history of capitalism. The author writes in clear, understandable language without jargon, producing a work that requires no prior knowledge yet is useful for those who do have familiarity with the subject.
Forced removal from the land, elimination of access to common lands and putting an end to the ability to live without working for others was essential for capitalism to develop. To demonstrate this, Ian Angus’ book concentrates on the enclosures in England and the clearances in Scotland. The book is forthright about the violent details as they unfolded from the 15th century through to the Industrial Revolution. England and Scotland were overwhelmingly populated by farmers, much as the rest of the world. Although there was wage work, very few were dependent on it and only under capitalism did mass reliance on wage work occur.
Forcing this reliance on wage work, and the massive exploitation associated with it, is central to the story. We are not spared the details of draconian 16th century legislation that mandated brandings with iron, whippings and death for those who refused an offer of work, and jail for anyone who offered or accepted wages higher than those set by local employers. Lest we think such laws were only in the distant past, Ian Angus reminds us that more than 4,000 enclosure acts were passed by Parliament from 1730 to 1840; these and other laws were implemented to force people into working in the new factories of the Industrial Revolution.
That such draconian laws were repeatedly passed over long periods of time demonstrate that capitalism is not “natural” and indeed could only be imposed by force, War Against the Commons persuasively demonstrates. This is a book that is useful for those already acquainted with this bloody history and wish to obtain more knowledge, including of the still largely unknown Winstanley and the Diggers movement, but also for those without this knowledge who wish to learn about the history of capitalism. The author writes in clear, understandable language without jargon, producing a work that requires no prior knowledge yet is useful for those who do have familiarity with the subject.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews