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# The Enclosure of the Commons and the Invention of Scarcity
Jordan Avery
History 214 — Professor Fischer
3 March 2026
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## Introduction
The enclosure of English common land between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries is usually told as a story about agricultural efficiency. This essay argues that it is better understood as a story about the deliberate manufacture of scarcity, and that the efficiency case was assembled after the fact.
## The commons before enclosure
Common land was not unowned. It was governed by dense local custom specifying who could graze how many animals, when, and on which parcels. Describing it as ungoverned was a rhetorical move, not a description.
## The efficiency argument
Contemporary advocates argued that consolidation raised yields. The evidence is real but narrower than the claim: yields rose on some soils, in some regions, over some periods.
## The manufacture of scarcity
What enclosure reliably produced was not higher output but a population without independent access to subsistence, and therefore available for wage labour.
## Conclusion
Reading enclosure as scarcity-production rather than efficiency-production explains the timing better, and it explains why the practice continued in places where the yield argument plainly did not hold.
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## References
Neeson, J. M. *Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820*. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Thompson, E. P. *Customs in Common*. New Press, 1993.This is the markdown the editor loads. Everything is editable.
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