What is the current consensus on the welfare effects of the enclosures in England and Scotland?

I suggest you research which economic historians have concluded that the net effects of enclosures were positive and the criteria they have used? As a graduate student at Stanford I once listened, amazed, as a job candidate from the University of Chicago presented a cost-benefit analysis of the enclosures. His idea of the "costs" were the bribes paid to parliament for the use of troops to clear the land and his idea of benefits was increases in ground rents that he imagined accurately reflected increases in productivity. It was a pitiful exhibition of the poverty of Chicago-style market worship that has become a foundation stone in the current neoliberal economics that dominates both academia and policy making. It's complete indifference to the whole scale destruction of  ways of life, to the quite immeasurable costs to human beings of being torn from homes and livelihoods, chased from their land and persecuted with the vile "bloody legislation" that Marx so accurately summarized in Chapter 28 of CAPITAL continues to this day - just as enclosures continue - everywhere from indigenous lands wanted for crops or tar sand exploitation to assaults on Internet access. Fortunately, resistance also continues, in forms such as First Nation challenges to Big Oil in Canada, Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas and the current campaign to defend Net Neutrality. As a general rule, the position of economic historians on such issues reflects their political bias and methodologies. For all her weaknesses, the work of  economist Elinor Ostrom has at least refuted Garret Hardin's ignorant thesis on "the tragedy of the commons" and in the process undermined one of the many reasons for the common underestimation by economic historians of the "value" of the commons to those who lost due to enclosures.

Dear Harry Cleaver,

Thank you for your answer, although I am not sure it is an answer to my specific question. I asked if there is any consensus among economic historians on the welfare effects of the British enclosures.

In your answer you seem to be using a very broad definition and a wide range of indicators both historically and geographically. Irrespective of the merits of such a broad scope, it has the drawback of making it more difficult to find reliable data for all the indicators implied. You also seem to presume a general, supra-historical theory, making it possible to generalize about the effects of processes of dispossession across time and space. I personally doubt the fruitfulness of such a theory, at least if one is empirically oriented.

I would argue for a more narrow definition, which allows us to use vital statistics, like longevity or child mortality or economic indicators, like income, expenditure or wealth. Such a definition increases the possibilities of finding reliable indicators and agreeing on an answer and the effects of dispossession on the various groups involved.

My original question arose after reading Ian Morris and his popular, well researched and argued “Why the West Rules - for Now” (Morris 2010, p. 498 ff.). Morris contends that British working people in the late 18th and early 19th century, despite the agonies of the enclosures, experienced positive welfare effects of the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy, more precisely in terms of real wages. Morris built on comparative data on wages in European and Chinese cities and quoted several works by Robert Allen and others to build his case. His whole story contradicts the classical accounts building on Marx according to whom the enclosures led to massive pauperization.

This provoked me to ask the question on Research Gate about any consensus among economic historians on this precise issue.

Piketty in his much written about “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (Piketty and Goldhammer 2014) has added to this debate. Being the first to conduct and condense research on distribution of incomes and wealth over a long period in countries like France, Britain, the US, Sweden etc., Piketty considerbly modifies Morris, as well as Marx, and finds that the real wages of British workers did not start to increase until the second half of the 19th century. If nobody finds faults with Piketty’s data, my own conclusion would be that the welfare effects of the enclosures were indeed negative, as Marx concluded based on very scant material, but that the real wages of industrial workers in Britain started to improve during Marx’s lifetime, a fact which escaped him. Morris’ and others’ point that the rural exodus was more driven by population increase than by coercive Enclosure Acts is also worth noting.

References:

Morris, I. (2010). Why the West rules - for now : the patterns of history, and what they reveal about the future. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Piketty, T. and A. Goldhammer (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Cambridge, Mass. ;, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Gören,

On the basis of your comments, I suspect that the paradigms within which we work are so different as to make real debate on this subject impossible. However, I will respond briefly.

I suggested you examine which economic historians reached what you believe to be a consensus, because the "field" is divided. Mainstream economists - in their usual efforts to prove Marx wrong - have sought evidence that enclosure was good for workers, Marxist economists have followed Marx in finding that it was not. Excerpting from http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357k/357ksg27.html : "Since Marx wrote there has been much debate about the issue of the enclosures. For an apologetic treatment that tries to explain the growth of labor supplies in other ways (e.g., population growth) see the book by J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, 1750-1880, London: Batsford, 1966. For a radical review of the issue and critique of such anti-Marxist arguments, see Bill Lazonick's article on the enclosures in the Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 6, No. 2, Summer 1974, pp. 1-59. For an even more recent argument that "enclosures" are an integral part of current capitalist strategy see: Midnight Notes, The New Enclosures, 1990." (I'll add your Morris ref.)

The differences between those who tend to agree with Marx and those who do not are partly methodological. Economists (and many sociologists) seek to restrict the variables included in their analysis to those that are easily quantifiable. This is partly a function of faith in quantitative methods - embraced since Petty and then the marginalist revolution - and partly due to the associated illusion that economics (and perhaps sociology?) is "value free", a "positive" science. Marxists, while happy to take quantitative measures into account - remember: Marx filled Capital with numbers taken from the reports of the factory inspectors and every other reliable source he could find during his endless hours in the British Museum - also demand that those numbers be evaluated critically both for what they reveal and what they do not reveal. As I'm sure you know, as a sociologist, that the study of income hierarchy has revealed no correlation between income and general "well-being". Income may rise but any number of widely recognized effects may offset the "welfare effects" of that rise, undermining any assumption that one's "well-being" has improved. It's quite possible to be rich and miserable – or, perhaps more to the point here, whatever money wages eventually obtained may not offset the bloody-whippings and brandings that preceded successful entry into the labor market.

A closely related methodological point is that context and framework have to be taken into account in using numbers. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that enough of those driven from their lands in England and Scotland through enclosure and persecuted while looking for a job, eventually found jobs that paid higher wages than their previous imputed money income (recognizing that vast numbers of those driven out had little or no prior money or interaction with markets) to conclude that their "income" rose. Would it be  proper, as some mainstream economists have done, to conclude that those enclosures and resulting increases in income proves Marx was wrong and that the "welfare effects" of enclosure were positive? Perhaps, if you focus your attention narrowly enough to ignore the larger context. But if you do not ignore it, then you are forced to evaluate the role of enclosures within the larger framework of emerging capitalism, of the creation of a whole new society, organized around the endless imposition of work, the exploitation it involves, the alienations it imposes and the geographical scope of that emergence. This last, because from the beginning the creation of the classes of capitalist society, and their antagonisms and struggles, were as global as capitalists were able to implement. Those English and Scottish capitalists, agrarian and industrial, who were building their own class as they whipped others into the working class, did not operate in England and Scotland alone, but reached out to enclose lands far away, massacre and enslave their peoples, throughout the Atlantic Basin and into Asia. Over time, whatever the initial improvement (or reduction) in standards of living for English and Scottish workers, their income DID improve as the enslavement of Africans etc made it possible for their employers to raise their wages. So, from a Marxist point of view the question of enclosure and its "welfare effects" cannot be evaluated narrowly, as you would like, but each case must be situated within the overall antagonistic dynamics involved in the rise and spread of capitalism. If you are willing to accept (tentatively) Piketty's data that covers a longer time frame, then you ought (I think) be willing to accept a larger geographical framework for evaluating the effects of enclosure – this, quite independently of the issue of what aspects of the lived reality of enclosure we take into account in each particular instance. 

Dear Harry,

You are right: our views of the world and of science are so different that debate is difficult. Let me just say that I have always been devoted to empirical research and to theoretical intepretation and problematization of such research. Theory which cannot be applied empirically and which is immune to empirical applications does not interest me. 

Please don't take this as a personal attack, but as a critique of your standpoints: I looked again at E.P. Thompson's classical 'The Poverty of Theory' and found this quotation which concluded his critique against Louis Althussser:

"We must put theory to work, and we may do this either by interrogating evidence (research) or by interrogating historiography and other theories (critique); and both these methods were the ones most commonly employed by Marx. Theoretical practice, which rejects the first procedure (dubbing it, my additiion GD, "empiricism"), and which reduces the procedure to caricature by measuring all other positions against its own pre-given orthodoxy, is evidence of nothing but the self-esteem of its authors. For the project of Grand Theory - to find a total systematized conceptualization of all history and human occasions - is the original heresis of metaphysics against knowledge." (1978, p. 303)

Therefore the welfare effects of the enclosures, rigourously defined and adequately measured, on the British rural and urban working class continues to be of interest to me.

Warm regards,

Göran

Göran,

I'm afraid I find your last comments unresponsive, to say the least. It seems to me you have merely restated your attachment to empirical data and its importance in verifying theory. As I have stated, I have no problem with that at all.

Your quotation of Thompson amuses me. Were you to peruse my study guide to Capital - one chapter of which I linked - you would find plenty of references and long quotes from Thompson precisely because of his empirical work. Although his students, like Peter Linebaugh, have gone beyond him, I am quite fond of Thompson's work and found his Poverty of Theory an amusing (tho limited) critique of Althusser - whose work, unfortunately, has led many Marxists to waste an enormous amount of time and energy. Thompson did us all a great service by actually gathering information on phenomena Marx only alluded to.

The issues I raised were not critiques of empirical work per se, but were about what phenomena and data need be taken into account. As I illustrated with my example of the Chicago School economist, too few and too narrowly defined variables can lead to results that at best are inadequate and at worst ludicrous. I suggested several dimensions of the issue of "welfare effects" - understood in the vernacular and not within the confines of neoclassical microeconomic theory - whose recognition, to my mind, require taking into account a variety of variables that don't seem to interest you - clearly not enough to respond. "Rigorous" definitions are certainly necessary, as is measurement as accurate as variables and data permit. But in a variation on the old saying, looking at only one or two species of tree in a forest can result in a quite inadequate grasp of a complex ecology.

Fine Henry! Now I think we agree. I never said that welfare effects are enough to study the effects of the enclosures. They are crucial however.