Enclosures and Oceans

Abstract

Enclosure is a concept used to describe how spaces, previously outside the reach of capitalist discipline, become subsumed to market logics, primarily through processes of privatisation. Beginning in Europe in the late Middle Ages, enclosure movements sliced up common fields, pastures and wasteland into private holdings, expropriating peasants from their land while leaving them ‘free’ to sell their labour on the emergent market economy (Hanna 1990; Polanyi 2001). This is a transformation of human and non-human lives and, crucially, of the socioecological relations that had worked to sustain this intersection. Notions of improvement, efficiency and modernization underpin enclosure drives, ideologies carried to the colonies to justify the removal of indigenous peoples from ancestral territories; a violence enacted through both military and legal means (Thompson 1991).