Enclosures

Under Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth Tudor there was a growing number of enclosures, i.e. seizures of common lands by rich landowners and displacement of peasants from them. The process of enclosure was accompanied by force, resistance, and bloodshed, resulted in unemployment and destitution, as well as decreased domestic grain production, which made England more susceptible to famine and high grain prices. At the same time, it sped up the capitalist production in England and, alongside with British colonialism, determined the fact that England has rapidly become the industrial and banking centre of the world. Enclosures remain among the most controversial areas of agricultural and economic history in England.

The feudal relations in agriculture retarded the development of industry and kept England within the limiting status of an agrarian country. The dispossession of the common land proved the fastest, but at the same time harshest, way from the old, traditional, agrarian society to an industrial system. Similar laws were enacted in the Netherlands, France, Spain, albeit on a smaller scale. In France the English agrarian reform was one of the sources of the physiocratic theory, or the economic policy of laissez faire20. Those countries, which did not opt for enclosures — Russia, Austria — did not embark on the path of classical capitalistic production like England's.

20 Another inspiration for Physiocrats came from China's economic system - then the largest in the world. Most Chinese were divided into four occupations with scholar-bureaucrats, who were also agrarian landlords, on top and merchants on the bottom because they did not produce but only distribute goods made by others. Leading physiocrats like François Quesnay were avid Confucianists that advocated China's agrarian policies (Derk Bodde).

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Rich landowners used their control of state processes to appropriate public land (common land, or commons) for their private benefit. Once enclosed, it could be used only by one owner, and it ceased to be common land. By the 19th century, unenclosed commons had become largely restricted to rough pasture in mountainous areas and to relatively small parts of the lowlands. Some historians argue that enclosure (when all the sophistications are allowed for) was a plain enough case of class robbery. Much of the peasantry of England as a class were destroyed. Enclosures involved a loss of common rights and could result in the destruction of whole villages. The enclosed lands were used for sheep herding and capitalist farming, which required few labourers. So unemployment was rampant, and peasants, evicted from their land, turned into vagabonds, beggars. It will not be much of an overstatement to say that English capitalism was virtually built on human bones; and it is not by chance that Thomas More, the famous humanist, writer, Chancellor of Exchequer during Henry VIII's reign, wrote: “your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I heard say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves.”

The legislation was adopted, which prescribed cruel punishment for persons accused of vagrancy and collecting alms without the permission of the authorities. They were whipped, branded, and committed to temporary slavery; if they escaped and were caught, they were condemned to perpetual slavery, and if they were caught for the third time, they were executed. The main victims of this repression were peasants driven from their land by enclosures. The first bloody law was Henry VII’s statute of 1495, and the statutes of 1536 and 1547 were especially cruel.

In 1576 a law was enacted establishing workhouses, where people lived in sordid conditions and worked like slaves for a bowl of gruel. The Act on the Punishment of Vagabonds and Sturdy Paupers, passed by Parliament in 1597, definitively established the law on paupers and vagabonds and remained in force unchanged until 1814. However, despite their cruelty, the bloody laws could hardly prevent the growth of vagrancy and pauperism.

The enclosures helped to create crowds of wage labourers, ready for capitalist exploitation, on the field of a capitalistic farmer. The first manufactures were not yet equipped with machines, they were based on brawn — human power. The developing capitalism demanded lots of cheap labour. So the evicted peasants, dispossessed monastic population, etc. became humble proletarians, accepting hired work under the worst conditions, ready to toil at manufactures 12 hours a day for a mere pittance. Besides, ship-owners had to recruit sailors for sailing their ships, where labour and treatment were extremely hard. Peasants with their own plots of land would not go there for love or money. So, many peasants were dispossessed of land, and the most obstinate of them were destroyed.

As mentioned above, more often than not enclosures resulted in conversion of land use from arable to pasture for sheep-farming. Some of them were, however, used for arable farming. Some were reclaimed for arable farming later, but it was capitalistic arable farming and some of those who had been ousted from their lands, returned to them in the new capacity of wage-laborers, hired by the new type of capitalist farmer to cultivate land leased by big landowners. Marsh lands were drained, agricultural implements were becoming more sophisticated, the growing inner markets acting as a stimulus for the extension and more intensive exploitation of arable lands. Land was becoming a source of profit. But as formerly on thе grounds of feudal right, land was rоуаl property as far as the law was concerned: it was held from the king - true, not for knightly service any longer, the holder was expected to pay for the right in coin.

Rise of Industries, Trade and Finance

In the 17th century the industrial development was coming to the fore, working changes in the country's economic life and in the people's minds. Old industries were growing in scope, for those industries coal and machines were needed, thus new industries were developing as

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well. Popular branches of industry included production of beer, glass, soap, which demanded large quantities of coal. Coal-mining was assuming larger and larger proportions, involving pumps and machinery. Some economic historians, estimating England's share in the European industrial production of the time, say that by 1640 England had mined four fifths of all European coal. It also stimulated the growth of shipbuilding, as most of the coal was carried by ships.

Artisans from other countries were encouraged to immigrate, new manufacturing centres were springing up, quickly growing to be a feature of the country's economic development. They were various, both of the large capitalist manufacture type and small manufacturing shops. This diversity of form in industrial enterprises was only natural for this transitional period.

When Henry VII disallowed the nobles to keep huge followings of retainers and Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, great numbers of people were left to their own devices. Later on many of them were absorbed by the growing industries of the towns — and what a lot of bread, meat, vegetables had to be produced to feed them.

The expropriation and eviction of a part of the agricultural population not only set free for industrial capital the labourers, their means оf subsistence and material for labour; it also created the home-market.

The new industries were mostly created in the form of centralized manufactures, while the old ones, like the production of woollen cloth, might be carried on in scattered shops and craftsmen's homes, though the cloth industry as such developed along capitalist lines, for it involved the control of the merchant over the individual weavers who could not alone command the necessary supplies of raw materials on the one hand and market contacts on the other. The clothiers, or wool manufacturers might possibly be considered the fathers of English capitalism in general.

English Colonialism and Principles of Foreign Policy

England perhaps has precedence over any other country in the world for acquiring colonies and using their resources. Many maintain, that the British wealth and power were built on the exploited labour and natural resources in lands colonized by the British. The colonies had become the major prerequisite for starting the English Industrial Revolution. Without her colonies, England would not have had enough initial capital for the modernization. The industrialization could have been by far less brisk and spectacular, or it would have lasted much longer. 21

In general, there were two principal patterns of colonization: that of the Catholic powers (Spain, Portugal) and that of the Protestant ones. Despite the initial atrocities, used to crush the resistance, the former basically got on together with the aboriginals, learned a lot from

21 Some “imperial” historians and neoconservative ideologues, such as John Seely, Charles Carrington, Niall Ferguson, claim that Britain was a kind of “benign empire”, benefiting the backward Eastern despotries by its liberal laws. To disprove these claims Dr. Priyamvada Gopal writes on the essence of colonialism:

“The evidence - researched by scholars such as Amartya Sen, Nicholas Dirks, Mike Davis and Mahmood Mamdani, Caroline Elkins and Walter Rodney - shows that European colonialism brought with it not good governance and freedom, but impoverishment, bloodshed, repression and misery. Joseph Conrad, no radical, described it as "a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly". Good governance? More famines were recorded in the first century of the British Raj than in the previous 2,000 years, including 17-20 million deaths from 1896 to 1900 alone. While a million Indians a year died from avoidable famines, taxation subsidised colonial wars, and relief was often deliberately denied as surplus grain was shipped to England.

Tolerance? The British empire reinforced strict ethnic/religious identities and governed through these divisions. As with the partition of India when 10 million were displaced, arbitrarily drawn boundaries between "tribes" in Africa resulted in massive displacement and bloodshed.

Freedom and fair play? In Kenya, a handful of white settlers appropriated 12,000 square miles and pushed 1.25 million native Kikuyus to 2,000 restricted square miles. Resistance was brutally crushed through internment in detention camps, torture and massacres. Some 50,000 Kikuyus were massacred and 300,000 interned to put down the Mau Mau rebellion by peasants who wanted to farm their own land. A thousand peaceful protesters were killed in the Amritsar massacre of 1919."

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them, turned them to Christianity. In South America colonists almost did not change the lifestyle of the Indian village-communities. They hardly restricted the trade with colonies.

The latter were incompatible with aboriginals, they just destroyed them (such was the fate of North American Indians, Australians, Tasmanians, etc.). In other colonies they imposed their rule: political institutions, economic mechanisms, culture and ideology, - carried through by puppet governments. They restricted the trade with colonies and practised protectionism (see below the tactics of indirect rule, the Navigation Acts).

The much-favoured tactics of the English colonization were settlements of colonizers and driving indigents off their lands. We may say, that England began as a settlers' country, with the Anglo-Saxons coming to the island to stay in the mid-5th century and eventually ousting the indigenous Britons, driving them to northern France (Bretagne), Wales, Cornwall and Cumbria. The same policy was conducted in Celtic Ireland, where the population was greatly diminished and the local language fell into desuetude.

And the same was done by the English settlers in America, Australia, Canada, South Africa, etc. J. Sakai writes: “What made North America so desirable to these people? Land. What lured Europeans to leave their homes and cross the Atlantic was the chance to share in conquering Indian land. At that time there was a crisis in England over land ownership and tenancy due to the rise of capitalism.”

The other tactics were indirect rule (particularly in parts of Africa and Asia), whereby external, military, and tax control were operated by the colonizers, while most every other aspect of life was left to local comprador aristocracies who had sided with the British. Thus the problem of domination by a tiny group of foreigners of huge populations was solved. The appointment of governors (or governor-generals, not to mention the Viceroy of India, or of Ireland) was the prerogative of the British Crown, which it selected from the representatives of the British aristocracy.

Another important principle of the British colonial rule was divide et impera ("divide and conquer"), that is maintaining and cultivating the British state power by inciting hostility between various tribes and peoples of the Empire. Representatives of the ruling elite pitted one community against another in order to maintain control over their territories with a minimal number of imperial forces. For example, for centuries the British Crown has deliberately driven a wedge between Catholics and Protestants, the Irish and the British in Ireland, and supported the political fragmentation of India (more than 600 feudal principalities), actively pitting one principality against another, with an almost complete lack of economic relations between them, as well as the caste system with all its prohibitions and restrictions.

By planting the imperial administration, the imposition of high taxes, the change of the judicial and financial systems, using cheap labour, the metropolis effectively tapped its colonies for their resources: first by direct plunder of riches, works of art, natural resources and other valuables, later by the policy of protectionism, under which the national (traditional) production of colonies was bullied and suppressed, while the goods of the metropolis were, on the contrary, pushed on the local markets. As a result of that policy, colonies were transformed into the raw material appendages of the metropolis: "I would not allow the colonists to make even a hob-nail for themselves" - said Lord Chatham, when head of the British government in North America. The Governor-General of India, Lord Bentinck reported in 1834: “…the bones of weavers bleach the plains of India", as a result of Britain's protectionist policy, which at first capitalized on the highly-skilled Indian textiles, by selling them in Europe and then, having acqiured their know-how and turning to machine mass production, banned the Indian goods in Britain and even on the local market, flooded India with their own textiles and ruined the local artisans. The same happened with other old industries: shipbuilding, metalworking, glass-blowing, paper industry, and many crafts. The outcome of the policy of the colonialists was the mass impoverishment of the local

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population, unemployment of an incredible size, as a result - famine, diseases and high mortality in the "favorite diamond in the crown of Her Majesty." With such an approach it is not a surprise that the parts of India, which for the longest time had been ruled by the British, ended up the poorest: Bengal, being a very rich and prosperous province before the arrival of the British, after 187 years of their rule, accompanied, as we are assured, by the energetic attempts by the British to improve living conditions and to teach people the 'art of selfgovernment', became a miserable mass of the poor, starving and dying people.

At first Britain followed mercantilist policies designed to strengthen the home economy, so the colonies were allowed to trade only with the mother country. By the mid-19th century, however, the British Empire gave up mercantilism and trade restrictions and introduced the principle of laissez faire (free trade), upheld by Adam Smith, with a few restrictions or tariffs. However, with the economy of the colonies maintained at a level much more backward than in the mother country and with colonies being bound to the metropolis by trade restrictions, the result was that the exchange of goods between the colony and the metropolis was lopsided (specialized and limited). In the colonies it was focused on a narrow range of products (bananas, coffee, etc.) or on the extraction and export of raw materials. It was a highly unequal exchange, too. For example, quoting the American economist Victor Perlo, the developing countries received 5 cents for a pound of sugar and 7 cents per pound of bananas, at the same time the sugar was sold in developed countries for 40 cents and bananas for 45 cents. With the transportation costs from 1 pound to 5 cents, it is estimated that the cost of 30 cents for each pound of sugar and 33 cents for each pound of bananas settles in the pockets of the imperialist bourgeoisie. This cost is just gratuitously transferred from the periphery to the metropolis of world capitalism.

The standard of living of the population of colonies was much lower than the standard of living of the inhabitants of the metropolis, and their social and political status was incomparable with the privileged guarantees of the metropolitan nation, there was also a significant limitation of the "natives" in their social and political rights. At the same time, the imperialist capital used high profits flowing from the periphery to “bribe” their own social rank and file, their working class and low-income strata, by paying them larger wages, providing for them social welfare, etc. As the British economist John Atkinson Hobson put it, "the ruling state has used its provinces, colonies and dependencies in order to enrich its ruling class and to bribe its lower classes into acquiescence"

An important feature of colonialism was its racist quality. Racism was rationalized as a theory of “higher” and “lower” races and curiously combined with liberal ideology. A. de Tocqueville in his book Democracy in America shows that the inevitable expulsion of Negroes and Indians from the civilized society was not because the colonizers questioned the idea of universal human rights, but because this idea could not be applied to creatures incapable of rational thinking. The mass extermination of people was done with full respect for the laws of humanism. John Locke, the founder of the theory of civil society, who developed the idea of the "inalienable rights", was not only an active supporter of slavery and helped to draw up the Constitution of the Southern U.S. states, but also invested his savings in the Royal African Company - the monopoly of the slave trade in Britain.

The general principles of foreign policy in Britain may be reduced to three:

"Balance of power". Britain's influence on the Continent of Europe rested snugly upon the doctrine of the balance of power. In those days, the Continental Great Powers were Germany, Austria — Hungary, Russia, France. "Balance of power" meant to Britain the equal division of these Powers so that she could, at a given time, exert a decisive influence;

Precluding the domination of other powers on the European continent as well as on the

approaches to India (that is, the land and sea routes leading from Europe to India and back). In the second half of the 20th c. the interpretation of this principle has been extended to the situation in Europe and Asia in general;

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