Planning the commons? Self-management, communal regulation of land and its eclipse in pre-capitalist England

Abstract

The ongoing eclipse of the Welfare State and the privatisation of public goods and services have triggered the appearance of discourses that claim the recovery of the commons and their collective self-management. In this context historical common lands and rights in pre-capitalist England are no longer a mere academic issue, as they reappear intensely in the sociospatial imaginaries of global activism. This reappropriation of the past seems legitimate, but such narratives often ignore the complexity of the management, planning and evolution of the historical commons. To fill these lacunae I study the institutions and modes of government that underpinned the communal regime in this period, emphasizing its condition of self-managed land use planning. Enclosure acts destroyed this regime, introducing a new logic of centralized, iniquitous planning: a logic which included not only the extinction of communal institutions and privatisation of land, but also the dispossession of rural labourers and their progressive proletarianisation.