This chapter examines the imbrication of late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century discourses on race and class, and thus of the formations of colonialism and capitalism, both within and beyond England as center of global empire and capital.  It performs readings of this imbrication in John Clare’s protestations against land enclosure in Northamptonshire in the Romantic period, and it shows how this nexus in Clare anticipates Palestinian protestations against the dispossession of ancestral land since 1948. In doing so, it juxtaposes resonant moments in connected histories of modernity and modernization that inform the history of global capitalism, which still enacts in many ways the racial antagonisms in Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation.

The 1800s was a decade of exceptionally high agricultural prices. The cost of food spiked because of deficient harvests and wartime disruption, against a background of rapid population growth. In the eyes of many contemporary observers, profiteers and monopolists were also to blame. This essay examines three poems that responded to the emergency: Samuel Jackson Pratt’s Bread; or, The Poor (1801), William Holloway’s The Peasant’s Fate (1802), and Thomas Bachelor’s The Progress of Agriculture (1804). It locates those poems in a larger tradition of rural verse exemplified by Oliver Goldsmith, Robert Bloomfield, and George Crabbe. As the new century dawned, the poets of country life confronted the social tensions implicit in England’s capitalistic farming system. They denounced what they saw as a contradiction between rising agricultural output on the one hand and, on the other, the dispossession of the ‘helpless myriads’ of the rural poor.

Grounded in comparative politics, this chapter presents new theory in comparative political economy: First, it argues that, in the context of technological transition, a legal system that facilitates reassignment of property rights, making certain rights less secure, plays an important and under-theorized role in promoting economic development. It focuses on China’s technological transition from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, industrial one to highlight the relationship between technology change, reassignment of land rights, and transformative economic growth. The chapter reinterprets England’s post–Glorious-Revolution reassignment of land rights, using enclosure, estate, turnpike, and other parliamentary acts, in light of China’s rise. It also identifies the problem of state misallocation of land resources in the Chinese case. Second, it argues that the authoritarian state also invests in the formal legal system in order to manage conflict over changes in land rights and to legitimate the state. It revisits England’s eighteenth-century use of law, including the Riot Act and Black Act, to contain protest over dispossession and compares it to China’s embrace of authoritarian legality to repress conflict. The chapter defines liberal and illiberal law in both form and content and locates the analysis in the context of the law-and-development movement.

The Gulf has acquired land in Africa, Europe and elsewhere for the purpose of cultivating commodities. There is considerable debate about these enclosures, and this chapter examines how they are understood. It also examines the scale and nature of these land grabs and what determines their success and failure. These enclosures can be found in a number of different locales, and this chapter examines their different characteristics.

How were England’s wetland margins imagined at a new scale, as a site of reform and profit at the heart of a thriving polity? This chapter traces the iterative rewriting of wetlands in histories, geographies, agricultural books, and pro-drainage pamphlets at the turn of the seventeenth century. Driven by desires to unify England and amplify national wealth, these improving authors reconceived the meanings and management of wetlands and common lands. Scholars have often identified this period as a hinge between long-standing beliefs that topography and climate shaped human bodies and societies and a new conviction that soil, water, and air could and should be altered through human intervention. This chapter suggests that environmental determinism and environmental reform were not antithetical impulses but instead two sides of the same coin. Improving authors interlaced older humoral theories with new ideas about political economy to articulate fen futures. In recasting wetlands as unruly, unhealthy, and unproductive, ambitious wetland projects became a ‘cure’ for the nation’s most pressing maladies, promising to produce productive land and industrious subjects.

How did ambitious projects of wetland improvement give rise to a new kind of environmental politics in early modern England? This chapter first asks how such projects reconfigure understandings of when, where, and how environmental change took place in this period. Environmental acts were political, it argues, because they relied on and engendered relationships of power: decision-making institutions, laws, legitimacy, and – above all – negotiation and conflict. It next explores what kind of politics were at work in imagining, implementing, and contesting wetland improvement. In emphasising material and institutional progress, studies of ‘improvement’ and ‘the state’ have often overlooked the contingent processes through which productivity and power were made and disputed on the ground. Mobilising custom as a practice and right, wetland communities played a vital role in the trajectory of improvement. Conflict over improvement exposed the contested nature of political authority in seventeenth-century England and generated material landscapes of flux. Finally, this chapter examines how speech acted and actions spoke to remake wetlands via print, maps, institutions, and environments.

If drainage aimed to free land from the vagaries of floodwater, then enclosure was necessary exclude commoners and transfer management of land to improving landlords and tenants. The development of ‘absolute’ private property in early modern England has often been analysed via legal categories or socio-economic outcomes. Resituating property-making as an environmental act, this chapter argues that the contested exercise of land rights in Hatfield Level relied on the ability to determine how water moved, where cattle could graze, and what kind of plants grew. It traces the words and practices through which commoners and improvers defined their rights, often hinging on disputes about the just distribution of resources. This chapter explores a spectrum of local responses to improvement, including complaints of scarcity, socially fraught adaptation, and action to reinforce customary rights. As disputes over enclosure escalated, physical acts of cultivation and grazing became means by rival groups asserted ‘right’ as jurisdiction and legitimacy. In doing so, they created contrasting environments, generative of different social, economic, and political relations.

This chapter presents a critical analysis of how historians have used the concept of capitalism. It argues that the financial history of capital needs to be integrated more fully into the histories of all social relations if we want to use history to refine a ‘presentist’ concept about financial power and its effect on society and political choice. It is a contention of what has been termed the ‘new history of capitalism’ that financial history is often too narrowly institutional in that it focuses to narrowly on economic growth and not the social effects of financialisation on broader society. Finance, in these histories, when socialised, is generally presented as having a negative role on broader social relations. However, capital was created institutionally through relations of interdependence first, and then once created was used by those who accumulated great amounts of it to become more powerful.

This chapter discusses the larger implications of Sanhe gods’ experiences. It analyzes the various forms of their resistance, from non-compliance to direct confrontation, and the state’s mechanisms of control, from gentrification to coercion. It ends with a discussion on Sanhe gods’ precarious future, as flexible employment becomes more widespread and the prospects for settling down in cities reduce even when the great gods have intentions to stay. It presents migrant workers’ experiences not only of factory hopping but also, and increasingly, of city hopping, as both livelihood strategies and coping strategies formed in response to state policies and repression.

Almost immediately after its publication in 1770, writers recognized The Deserted Village as a politically radical poem. This view is reflected in several imitations published in Britain in the decades immediately following. Writers in the British colonies in North America and the early United States adapted the poem to other ends, replacing the temporal relationship between the two Auburns in Goldsmith’s poem with a spatial relationship. This substitution allowed them to read The Deserted Village as a description of England and the Auburn of old as a representation of the promise of the emerging nation. This chapter traces the afterlife of Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, his only poem to have had a considerable influence on other poets, from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century reworkings in Britain and America through to contemporary reimaginings by Irish poets.

This chapter discusses the design of zoo enclosures and briefly considers important stages in the history of zoo design. Animals must be safely contained within zoos and the nature of the containment varies between species. From time to time containment methods fail and animals escape, sometimes with fatal consequence for them and the people they encounter. There is an ongoing debate about the appropriate amount of space required for some species, especially large carnivores and other wide-ranging taxa. Minimum space requirements for taxa are arbitrarily determined, and usable space and enclosure shape should be considered when enclosures are designed. A number of studies have examined enclosure use by zoo animals, the need for shade and an appropriate substratum. Visitor behaviour may affect enclosure use in some taxa. Enclosure design is a compromise between the need that animals have to avoid the gaze of the public and the desire of visitors to see the animals.

Row upon row of Victorian terraced houses in areas such as Romsey testify to the huge expansion of Cambridge in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The author shows how the growth of town and University was hastened by the enclosure of the medieval open fields, the arrival of the railway in 1845 and long overdue reforms to the University. The population of the University swelled as it finally opened its doors to scholars of different religions in 1856, and to women in 1869. The author looks at pioneer women at Newnham and Girton, the first Black students, and the first academic wives permitted in Cambridge. The role of University abolitionists and campaigners such as Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and Olaudah Equiano are also explored. When the Duke of Devonshire founded the Cavendish Laboratory, there followed a tremendous period of scientific advance which included the discovery of the electron and neutron and splitting of the atom, led by J. J. Thomson, Rutherford and Chadwick. Significant individuals such as Darwin, Wittgenstein, Keynes, Virginia Woolf and poet Rupert Brooke are also included, as are the charms of Grantchester Meadows and the Orchard Tea Garden.

This chapter introduces the multiple roles of marine protected areas using the language of the commons. After introducing how international biodiversity law uses commons' language, it attempts to discuss two main characterisations of marine protected areas: marine protected areas as regulatory tools for common-pool resources and marine protected area as institutional sites for supporting or hindering commoning practices. The discussion draws on three principal strands of social science literature: political ecology to show how rational and scientific interventions are always political, geographical literature to discuss the meaning of territory and uncover the more-than-human elements in the analysis of conservation intervention and most crucially, the literature on commons, which spans from the more traditional Ostromian analysis of common-pool resources to the more recent and politicised literature on commoning. Investigating the relationships between marine protected areas and commons is an essential preliminary step to enable a critical discussion of how English law and regulation conceptualises marine protected areas and contributes to the formation of marine protected areas as spaces of opening and/or closing.

In the seventeenth century, the economic center of Europe shifted from Italy to northwestern Europe, because of technological advances, institutions that promoted capital accumulation, and stronger networks of exchange in a booming Atlantic economy. The lack of all these made eastern Europe the least prosperous part of the continent. In western Europe, new crops and crop rotation patterns, improved livestock breeding, the draining of marshes, and other developments led to significant growth in agricultural productivity, though they were also socially disruptive. Demand for new consumer goods increased, spurring both global trade and local production. With a slight improvement in the climate in the middle of the eighteenth century, along with new food crops, better public health measures, and other factors, the population of Europe began to rise more swiftly than it had beforehand. Many people combined agricultural work with handicraft production, or migrated to cities in search of work, gathering together in manufactories organized by investors. Work increasingly involved the use of machines powered by hand, animals, water, wind, and – by the eighteenth century – coal. This transformation occurred first in cloth production, and then in mining, with negative effects on air quality and the environment.

This introduction sketches the main arguments about the contribution of farming books to the development of agrarian capitalism and lays the groundwork for the detailed argument in later chapters. It first offers a critique of the standard research paradigm, the enlightenment model, which only evaluates the role of books with respect to technological change and is insensitive to early modern social relations. It then explains the research method and scope, focused on British agricultural books printed between 1660 and 1800. Since the structure of the book is thematic, it presents a broad survey of agricultural books and authors to serve as a reference for the rest of the book. It ends by summarising how the core argument is developed over seven chapters.