A Leftist History Tale

I’m writing a big book touching on the “enclosure movement” of the 1700s in England

I’m writing a big book touching on the “enclosure movement” of the 1700s in England. A lot of educated people, especially if they’ve read Marx, have heard about enclosures. Most of what they know ain’t so.

English enclosure was a sort of land reform, but reforming the land away from smallholders—not towards them. It plays a big part in the political beliefs of the left worldwide. The great left-wing historian E. P. Thompson (1923–1993) declared enclosure to be “a plain enough case of class robbery.” According to him, it was reverse Robin Hood: rob the poor to give to the rich.

Such things happen, of course. The rich are good at that. But the tale that most educated people believe they know about enclosure is wrong. The tale is that enclosure ripped the workers from the villages and drove them into the factories, where they were horribly exploited. The industrial revolution, it is said, was created by the enclosure movement providing its work force.

Nothing about the tale is true. In fact, enclosure increased the number of workers in villages. It stands to reason that rising productivity of agriculture would keep or attract workers to implement it. And enclosures were not more labor-saving than land-saving. Sir Thomas More, writing in the early 1500s, famously talked of “sheep eating men.” Sheep herding with a few shepherds replaced wheat growing, which employed many workers. But it’s not true of 1700s England. Inefficient growing of wheat was replaced by efficient growing of wheat, not by a few shepherds. And anyway the geography is all wrong. The factories were in the North of England, not in the South, where the enclosures actually happened. No one moved from the South to the North. The workers in the factories came from Ireland or the North—which were areas with no enclosures.

The 19th-century reaction to ‘capitalism’ fuels the modern suspicion that there must be something wrong with rich people and their profit. The suspicion is in fact ancient. A jailer in the 13th century scorned a rich man’s pleas for mercy: “Come, Master Arnaud Teisseire, you have wallowed in such opulence! . . . How could you be without sin?” It gives people satisfaction that in telling of enclosure, sinful rich people, or other tales of the left, they exhibit a clever cynicism.

Primary-liberal economists keep explaining that Eduardo Saverin’s or Elon Musk’s grotesquely large fortunes are a temporary but necessary signal and incentive to innovation. Entry, if not blocked by political corruption, spreads the benefits down to us consumers. Steam engines. Cheap steel. Cell phones. Facebook. And enclosures.

The Nobel economist William Nordhaus reckons that only 2 percent of the total U.S. gain from innovation since World War II has stuck to the hands of the innovators such as Saverin or Musk. The 98 percent has eventually gone to us.

For the first time in human history many of us have accepted since the 1700s at a big scale the Bourgeois Deal—“Leave me alone and I’ll make you rich.”

Then it happened.


Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.