The Enclosure of Knowledge: Books, Power, and Agrarian Capitalism in Britain, 1660–1800

In the second edition of the Economist newspaper in September 1843, the paper celebrated the fact that “active and intelligent landlords . . . [were] breaking up the hard clods of ignorance . . . [and] the art of husbandry, is rapidly changing into the science of agriculture.” Whether one accepts the Economist's assessment of the changing nature of agriculture in England in 1843 or not, James Fisher's fascinating book demonstrates clearly how long delayed, conflicted, and fraught with social significance that process was.The Enclosure of Knowledge focuses on books about agriculture through the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain. Fisher outlines how the popularity of such writing ebbed and flowed, but they became much more prevalent from the middle to the end of the eighteenth century. Through this century and a half, the nature of such books changed: from books that assembled local habits of husbandry into collected anecdotes, to conscious efforts to produce guides based on such practices, to works that espoused theories based on experimentation. Such writing had critics in all time periods. Complaints ranged from comments that there were too many such books, too full of borrowed advice, to the warnings of Arthur Young (who contributed no small part of these books) that “books are at hand, and it may be thought that agriculture is to be learned from them. . . . No man could be such an idiot” (187).Throughout, Fisher places his work in opposition to those who suggest that writing about agriculture was just another example of the application of Enlightenment and scientific experimentation applied to agriculture—another example of the shift from art to science. Instead, Fisher argues that such writing was an attempt at the appropriation of farming knowledge from those who labored on the land by those who did not. Such writing was as much a process of the “enclosure” of farming as the more widely discussed land enclosures of the late eighteenth century and an important part of the spread and triumph of agrarian capitalism. As Fisher says, “books disrupted and reordered how knowledge was produced, stored, transferred, acquired, exercised, and legitimated, subordinating a labour-based system beneath a book-based system. . . . The plough was subordinated to the pen as those who worked the land were increasingly subordinated to those who owned and managed it” (263–64). This study provides an effective and important corrective to scholarly books on agriculture through this period that demonstrate little appreciation for how whatever practical knowledge they contained was “lifted” from those who labored in the field and with even less appreciation for the social consequences of this writing.Fisher's study demonstrates a quite remarkable familiarity with a wide range of books on agriculture through a century and a half of such writing. The book discusses the works of some of the best-known authors of the eighteenth century—Arthur Young, William Marshall, Lord Kames, Nathaniel Kent—and a host of their less-celebrated peers. (The table in the appendix listing the authors sited by date and including details of their education, etc., is particularly useful and interesting.) Fisher handles all of this in nicely balanced, articulate, and clear prose, treating such works with the seriousness they deserve but not immune to the humor and absurdity of some of their arguments.There is less here than some may wish about the way such appropriation of knowledge was resisted, opposed, and/or ridiculed, a function partly of the focus on books published on agriculture rather than their reception or opposition to the gathering of such knowledge.There are also times in this book, perhaps, when Fisher is too insistent on making his argument. Some readers may find this especially so in the introductory and concluding sections, where the author expands on the lessons to be learned from this book. Nonetheless, it is no doubt true that this history of the enclosure of knowledge about farming “has profound significance for our understanding of how modern capitalism developed” (275). Fisher has provided us with an important reminder of this significance and a useful discussion of a remarkably extensive set of books on agriculture and has packaged it all in interesting and articulate prose.

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