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nascent agrarian capitalists; freeing those assets from their network of feudal social
obligations greatly facilitated their circulation as commodities and their more 'effi -
cient' economic use by allowing them to be more divisible, alienable, calculable,
usable as collateral, and so on (Castree, 2003). Thus, a fundamentally severing of
one set of social and socio-natural relationships, that prevailing under and remain-
ing from feudalism, was followed by a reconstitution of necessary relationships
among people and their environments through capitalist relations of ownership,
production and exchange.
Such wrenching changes were effected not only through everyday struggles
between commoners and landowners, but through sweeping ideological transforma-
tions as well. The centuries that saw the most active enclosures also saw dramatic
changes in how economic value, property and the relationships between individuals
and society were theorised and prioritised, changes that helped to build support for
and legitimate the enclosures. Physiocratic theories of value insisted on the centrality
of agricultural production to national wealth, encouraging states to initiate national
strategies and policies to maximise agricultural productivity. Physiocratic and labor
theories of value agreed that value was created by the application of human labor
to nature; therefore, society ought to be structured in ways that would maximise
individuals' incentives to work, and particularly to engage in agricultural improve-
ment designed to increase the productivity of both land and labor. John Locke,
Jeremy Bentham and many others argued that strong, clear private property was
the type of property most conducive to encouraging such work and the creation of
value, since people would work hardest and take the greatest care with their
resources if they would reap all of the resulting benefi ts, whereas the ambiguities,
collective hazards, and safety net of common property would discourage work,
investment, and stewardship. Finally, Thomas Malthus became the best known of
many to make the argument that society had no place for or obligation to those
who failed to support themselves through individual work within the context of a
fully owned and privatised landscape: in a nutshell, those who would not or could
not work for wages (and who were not fortunate enough to own property already)
should be allowed to starve to death. Ironically, Malthus claimed to found his argu-
ment on humanitarian grounds: feeding the poor, of whom there were clearly too
many for the limited agricultural base of the country to support, would simply lead
to a larger number of insupportable poor people in future generations; not only
would the latter starve in turn, but they would likely turn violent and attack those
whom the resource base could support, leading to far more total human suffering,
as well as waste and ineffi ciency. Thus, the strong individualism of liberalism and
capitalism, in which relationships among people and between people and nature
were mediated through commodity exchanges within a fully privatised landscape
and no one was owed any living or support, was presented as more humane and
more conducive to the careful stewardship of natural resources than the commons,
in which people existed in complex webs of reciprocal obligations and overlapping
rights to local environments.
As noted above, much historical and geographical detail about actual historical
commons is glossed over in the increasingly generalised and abstracted narrative
laid out in the previous few paragraphs. Reconstructing more precise and empiri-
cally substantiated understandings of the many varieties of pre-industrial commons
through the use of both archival and fi eld methods has been the work of many his-
torians and historical geographers (it is a perennial topic in the
Journal of Historical
