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Enclosure Folk,
I agree with Greg, as I usually do. When I first started to examine
enclosure around 1970 I had exactly in mind The Importance of Merely Legal
Changes. I started with Contract, but saw that the state of the legal
history literature at the time would make it hard for an outsider to say
anything much. So I tried enclosure, was stunned by the volume of writing,
and came to the conclusions Greg did: that there was not that much in it.
The private gains were adequate to the purpose--I stand by the doubling of
rent, which I calculated in the late 1970s from estate studies and
journalistic sources; and anyway if the private gains were not adequate
it's hard to see why it was done, and so persistently. The social gains, I
reckoned in 1972, following in this the Fogel/Fishlow spirit on railways,
were no Revolution. In an extension of the 1972 paper published in 1975
(Eric Jones and William Parker, eds.) I calculated that the gains to the
landlords from hurting the poor could not be a great part of the landlord's
gain. This is not the same thing as saying that the hurt to the poor was
small on the scale of the income of the poor, merely that "class robbery"
is a silly way of characterizing enclosure if one believes that robbers
operate with gain in mind. "Class negligence," perhaps, though I will feel
more comfortable with that as a scientific conclusion when I find someone
asserting it who does not vote Labour.
So what is at issue, Ken, is as Greg says whether neo-institutionalism can
explain modern economic growth, yes? On the left flank one is examining
the belief that capitalism began with institutions of Theft (enclosure, the
slave trade, dark satanic mills). On the right the belief that capitalism
began with institutions of Property. (With Proudhon left for the synthesis!)
By the way, contrary to Doug North's frequently expressed but on that
account no less absurd claim that Neo-Institutionalism C'est Moi, we
free-market cliometricians were right from the start chiefly concerned with
neo-institutionalist questions: Was slavery a drag on growth? Did Empire
work economically well? Was free trade a success? And what about enclosure?
Regards,
Deirdre McCloskey
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