Enclosures and the Making of the Modern World - Prof Imogen Tyler

[@tonycarton8054]

this is brilliant work .I was born /brought in N Ireland ,spent about 45 years in New Zealand ,now back again in NI .I am wishing to trace commonalities in Enclosures in Ireland and New Zealand .Keep up the great work .Slainte / Kia kaha

[@GoodnWise]

Thank you Prof. Tyler for a brilliant, informative lecture.

[@Nicole-zq2ur]

Very interesting to make those connections explicit; all part of the same project. I just watched Naomi Kleins' documentary "This Changes Everything" which explores a more recent manifestation of the same ideas; again, focusing on similarities worldwide. Very important to understand the forces shaping our world so that we can challenge the more destructive aspects of them. Thanks.

[@jplj7013]

Brilliant explanation of shocking events that few people understand.

[@marinakukso]

excellent lecture, and thank you for making it so well-produced and publicly available!

[@diegogarciachargos9007]

great job Prof Imogen Tyler, very informative on multiple levels, set me off on so many paths to discover more, yours truly, joe soap

[@johnconlon9652]

My own view is that the Decline and Fall of Homo sapiens started with urbanisation, circa 10,000 years ago and may now already be agonal; in a crowd, the psychopathic born scum rise to the top, whilst those with sociopathic tendencies learn to try and join their "superiors". Born in Preston in 1949, in 1973, I interviewed a Psychopath in my final medical Psychiatry exam. Got the diagnosis right and have been interested in personality disorders ever since ... decided not to join so many journeymen psychiatrists, of whom there are even more nowadays. Medicine is now a business, not a vocation. Whenever I meet any of the "Elite", I try and work out where he or she lies on the disorder spectrum; the more money, the worse it gets. And I avoid towns and cities. I enjoyed the talk. Slante. ☘

[@malcolmstar8036]

Thank you. I have been interested in the Levellers and Diggers which I learned about as a young man in the 60’s . I’d not been aware of links between enclosures and slavery I’m particularly interested in discovering the link between the psychological alienation and isolation of the modern person and the history of enclosure. Can you point me in the direction of other sources.

[@birdyandthebees3077]

thank you for this!!!!!

[@lifeasadreamrecords4479]

awesome presentation. i just came across the term enclosures, went on youtube and found this. thanks!

[@littlebickley]

Thank you for sharing your work here. Connections I had not previously made. When will the extraction end? When there is nothing left? How can we even begin to turn this around and win back the earth?

[@clive373]

I wish every person understood this.

[@tonyaustin4472]

This sadly is yet another misleading political polemic conflating two separate historical events; namely the complex British enclosure phenomenon and the oversea’s exploitation of slaves mainly by a relatively small number of the British mercantile. It’s sloppy and it seems to me irresponsible for a lecturer to put this up in such a biased take on separate events. The English enclosures were reactions to multiple separate forces over centuries for example climate changes, plagues, wool prices, draining of fen lands, dissolution of monasteries, development of agricultural machinery and many many more. It’s depressing to see these two really important but largely unconnected events turned into a kind of Marxist alternative truth.

[@clarkbowler157]

Do you have any proof that enclosure was in fact not an act of violent class suppression? Can you please point me towards some resources?

[@tonyaustin4472]

If you would go and look at any authoritative economic agricultural history you’d find out that this lecturer is either biased or lacking any perspective. It wasn’t the enclosures that diminished the number of land owners: it was the landowners who carried out the classic 17th to 19th Century enclosures. The folk who actually farmed the land were a mix of large and small farmers, craftsmen along smallholders. In addition the Lord of the Manor held his or her own parcels of pasture and arable and either employed his own workers or had an arrangement that the other tenants would do it for him. It was an extremely simple system and it worked well for centuries. Problems came about which doomed the Manorial system were many and various as I explained in my other comment, but some parts of England were still unenclosed well into the 19th Century. The small market town where I live wasn’t enclosed till 1844 and not far away from me is a village that remains unenclosed to this day. So what happened to the folk working on the land? First of all they were given plots of land reflecting in size the holdings they held of the Lord. Some did well by that, some struggled with inadequate small plots; what the smallholder lost were the rights of common pasture after the harvest. Some of them developed trades, some went to work for the new enclosed farms, others migrated to towns to work in the new industries that were changing the country from an agricultural economy to an industrial one. Where there was violence it was with the introduction of machinery into the agricultural economy; the draining of vast areas that had been fenland, marshland etc with the resultant disruption to long established local economies based around fishing, thatching, pasturing of cattle and sheep in the summer months and the cutting of fodder for the winter. See how nuanced this all is. Forget your Marxist rhetoric: look at this as the endless change of human life. You can’t live in a point of time, some frozen idyl that hasn’t come from somewhere and isn’t going anywhere. I’m talking about the Enclosures here not the atrocity of slavery. The Enclosures were just a small part of our history, just as the coming of the first farmers would have affected the existing hunter gatherer societies. Try and take a balanced view :-) we are never going back to being hunter gatherers nor are we going to un-enclose the agricultural landscape….in fact it’s looking like the fens I live on the edge of are going to end up being re-flooded in order to protect London and the South East from climate change :-)