From: Steve Davies (steve365@btinternet.com)
Date: Thu Apr 10 2003 - 02:04:06 MDT
Lee said
> Moreover, a number of bad laws have worsened the prospects
> of the poor, and have increased inequality. Zoning ordinances
> are now used to prevent growth and thus to cordon off "good"
> areas so that poorer people cannot move there. Thus over time
> cities become less homogeneous compared to, say, 1900.
Quite right but don't you mean *more* homogeneous and less heterogeneous?
> > Britain got richer in the enclosure movement, with tenants
> > being kicked off the land for sheep farming; the tenants
> > would probably have words about it not getting internally worse.
>
> The land was communally owned, not privately, and it was becoming
> a worse disaster each year for the people living there (they were
> not tenants as such, yet). This, of course, is what is referred
> to as "the tragedy of the commons". When the land became privately
> owned, it turned out not to be theirs. (Surprise, surprise---
> zoning in the 18th century---the rich get to exclude the poor.)
> In any case, the conditions in the cities to which they moved,
> as atrocious as they are to us, were probably better than the
> horrific conditions from which they came.
I can't let that pass without correcting it. Firstly the chronology is up
the spout. Enclosure of arable land (and converting of much upland areas for
pasture in the process) took place mainly in the fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries and didn't require Enclosure Acts. Secondly, the land
that was enclosed in the eighteenth century (almost entirely pasture) was
*not* owned in common. There is still several million acres of "common land"
in Britain and every square foot of it is privately owned. "Common land" in
English law is privately owned land where the owner does not have the right
to exclude others from access to the land i.e. there is a public right of
access (in the 18th century this included the right to graze livestock). The
Enclosure Acts were not put through by landlords against the wishes of their
tenants. On the contrary, the Acts resulted from petitions which were signed
and drawn up by all of the people with an interest, including the tenants.
The procedure used meant that you had to have the tenants' agreement because
if they objected the cost of the Act would become prohibitive. In the long
run the landlords, along with the larger tenants, got most of the gain in
the shape of increased land values but in the shorter term a large part of
it went to smaller tenants. The undoubted losers were landless labourers who
lost their access rights. Sorry to go on, but this is a classic case of how
arguments about the present are distorted by bad history. The narrative of
enclosure that you both use is the one put forward by the Hammonds in the
1900s, which no historian has taken seriously since the 1960s.
Steve Davies
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