Bargain-Villéger, Alban
The Rise of Property and the Death of the Moral Economy: Enclosure and Social Unrest in Late-Eighteenth Century England
AbstractThe Rise of Property and the Death of the Moral Economy: Enclosure and Social Unrest in Late-Eighteenth Century England – Ewan Martel
Eighteenth-century Great Britain was a kingdom marked by the rise of a property-based and highly individualistic conception of social and economic structures came a doctrine of improvement based upon extracting the most value from a tract of land possible. Parliamentary enclosure was critical to this change, seeing lands converted from something of communal value to individual property. This work argues that the growth and implementation of parliamentary enclosure was a source of immense social unrest in late-eighteenth century Britain as the process and its supporting ideologies were inherently counter-intuitive to traditional systems of communal land ownership and subsistence. This paper utilizes primary sources from both landowners implementing enclosure and the responses of commoners and enclosure's opponents to better understand the agency of the peasantry in their fight against a damaging practice and how forms of unrest were multi-faceted and prevalent, despite the growing power of the land-owing gentry.
Author Keywords: Class, Common Lands, Eighteenth-Century, Enclosure, Great Britain, Social Unrest