David L. Johnson

The enclosure of the commons—land traditionally held and used by the public—began in medieval England, and has continued ever since. In his 2014 book Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, American historian Peter Linebaugh contends that the enclosure and privatisation of the commons was inseparable from England’s industrialisation, as well as the development of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. In other words, enclosure played a foundational role in the rise of racial capitalism—a global system of value extraction and capital accumulation dependent on what abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as “the state-sanctioned and/or legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death.” Linebaugh identifies three major waves of enclosure.