Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America

WHAT WERE THE BROAD PROCESSES by which settlers of European stock created new forms of tenure and wrested control of lands from indigenous peoples, first in the Americas and later across wide stretches of Africa and Oceania? Anyone interested in this basic question about colonization and dispossession in an Atlantic world setting may be tempted to think in terms of a great "enclosure movement" that took shape first in England and Western Europe and then extended overseas to the New World, bringing survey lines, fences, and legal rules fostering exclusive access and transferability. More than one historian has pointed in the direction of such an extended conception of enclosure, although none has so far made the case in detail. "When the English took possession of lands overseas, they did so by building fences and hedges, the markers of enclosure and private property," write Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. 1 In relation to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, E. P. Thompson has also pointed to a connection between enclosure within England and the imposition of private property across the overseas British Empire, notably in India, where the Permanent Settlement of Bengal (1793) represented a particularly brutal and doctrinaire attempt to establish unitary proprietorship over land. Thompson's argument about enclosure and colonization appeared in an essay published late in his life, and it touches on North America, New Zealand, and Africa as well as India.