Reimagining the Land

Enclosure and the Politics of Exclusion

Abstract

This essay argues that enclosure was not a natural or inevitable stage of economic development, but a revolutionary reimagination of landscape that transformed land from a shared ecological resource into exclusive property. In pre-enclosure England, common rights structured collective relationships to land through practices of shared use, which were later delegitimized as inefficient or uncivilized. Through both ideological justifications and material technologies, enclosure redefined what counted as ‘natural,’ recasting communal practices as disorderly while elevating privatized, controlled landscapes as markers of progress. Extending this analysis to the American West, the essay demonstrates how barbed wire and Lockean property theory facilitated the violent exclusion of Indigenous peoples and the imposition of colonial spatial orders. Engaging with Marxist, revisionist, and environmental historiography, it challenges narratives that portray enclosure as agricultural improvement, instead emphasizing how discourses such as the ‘tragedy of the commons’ stigmatized communal land use and legitimized dispossession. Ultimately, enclosure is understood as a process that combined coercion and ideology to naturalize inequality, erase alternative ecological knowledge, and enforce new regimes of access, producing long-term social and environmental consequences.