The enclosures, Ireland, colonialism.

The following is from an early draft of WWPCDN. There was a lot that didnt make the final edit as I was way over the word count. But I'm sharing it in light of the UK MPs Report that links the increased use of the term 'white privilege' with the adverse material conditions of the 'white working class' rather than engaging with the fact that the exploitation, impoverishment and disenfranchisement of the working class is  centuries old and a key feature of the British class system. The relationship between the colonisation of Ireland, the enclosures, the colonisation of the America's and the trans-atlantic slave trade is really important but generally overlooked. 

Let me know your thoughts x

In the late 1500s, as the Tudor monarchy ‘sought to extend its rule over Ireland, it tried something new, something that would have far-reaching implications for the development of British imperialism’ (listen babes, its allllll connected, this is why history is SO important) … ‘The very conscious intention was to establish an English –style commercial order, a new kind of economy based on new relations on the land, new relations between landlord and tenant, like the ones that were driving ‘improvement’ in England ‘ (Meiksins Wood 153-154). The fact that the English elites subject the English poor to exploitative economic systems they would impose in the colonies is often overlooked and ‘improvement’ had vast implications for both the domestic practice of enclosure and the English poor as well as for dispossession of indigenous peoples in colonial territories.

Writing about America and its indigenous peoples John Locke argues that the Indian had failed to establish his right to the land and as such the land was fair game for the more ‘industrious’ and ‘rational’ colonialists (MW 157) How sway!.

Accordingly America was begging for colonization. Where an acre of land in ‘unimproved’ America had not produced exchange value comparable to that of improved land in England, ‘liberating’ (ahem) the land from the ‘natives’ and increasing its financial value was an act of charity not theft!

These days (some of us) have at least a familiarity with the ways in which the English went forth, and ‘liberated’ the land; from Ireland, to North America, to Africa and Asia. However, we are often less aware that the same processes that happened in the colonies, were first finessed right here in England with the appropriation of land by the aristocracy, from the ‘commoners’. The process of enclosure began to be a widespread feature of the English agricultural landscape during the 16th century and between 1750 and 1850, around 4000 Enclosure Acts were passed transforming common land into the exclusive private property of large landowners . The consequences of this were manifold but amongst them you have the dispossession of the English poor, driven from the land that had sustained them pushed to the rapidly expanding cities, now entirely vulnerable and dependent upon securing some form of wage labour in the filthy teeming newly industrialised cities.

We see the same argument for colonial settlement of Ireland that is later made for dispossession of Indians, the enclosure in England and the extinction of the customary rights of English commoners (MW160). The Irish case significant not just because earliest but also because Ireland was in 17th favourite test case laboratory for English social theory and natural science (MW161).

There can be little doubt that the English colonial experience, first in Ireland and then in the New World, was a major inspiration in English theories of property and value, the basic tools for understanding their own domestic capitalism (MW162). The Irish farmer or the Indian hunter-gatherer, indeed the Indian cultivator, may occupy or work the land, but s/he has failed to add sufficient exchange value to it by means of improvement (MW163).