One passage of Brett Christophers’ The New Enclosure stands out above all others. It is in the book's conclusion, where Christophers crafts his summation around a key factoid. Since 1979, over 1.6 million hectares, or 8 per cent% of the entire British landmass, has moved from public into private ownership. When we add other land transfers associated with utility and public enterprise sell offs, this number increases to 2 million hectares. Christophers characterizes this as a process of ‘enclosure’, and thus provocatively equates recent land transfers to the brutal land reforms of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For Christophers, the word ‘enclosure’ captures ‘the broad tenor of land privatization in modern Britain because it evokes that last great programme of “privatization” visited on Britain's land and those dependent on it’ (p. 323). What primarily unites the two distinct periods of land reform is therefore ideology, since the justification for each was ‘that existing forms of use and ownership are wasteful, and that private ownership are more productive’ (ibid.).
The book develops this argument through seven clearly structured and well-written chapters. In the book's first substantive chapter, Christophers lays out his conceptual framework, a politico-economic approach that squarely positions shifts in landownership as a function of state restructuring. Much of this remains firmly within the Marxian frame. However, this section of the book is at its most insightful and provoking when Christophers moves beyond familiar Marxist tales of dispossession, exploitation and neoliberalization. Adam Smith receives significant treatment, particularly with respect to how he dealt with the problem of public interest. So too Thomas Jefferson's idea of an agrarian democracy makes a brief appearance. By engaging with voices outside the critical doxa and revisiting the often-overlooked nuances of other thinkers, this is brave stuff. It also offers readers a glimpse into other perspectives, where the problem that concerns Christophers’ book morphs into new forms. As the book begins, Christophers therefore asks his readership to think about public – and by extension private – ownership with nuance, producing space for the reader to suspend normative judgement and proceed without some simple formulation of public = good, private = bad.
It is therefore a great disappointment that this otherwise excellent book slowly loses this engaging inquisitiveness as it proceeds. As one moves through Christophers’ accounts of British landownership and the interlinked processes of land sale, privatization, and post-privatization, the argument becomes more and more orthodox. This is not to claim that the story told is not compelling. The book leaves you with little doubt that Britain has undergone a radical transformation, and that land transfer has been a central part of the story. The book does a fine job of showing how successive British governments have used a variety of means to push government owned land into private hands. By explaining this as a ‘new enclosure’, Christophers persuasively argues that this is a process with some cohesion. But are the multitude of land transfers (e.g. social housing sales, utility privatization, industry sell offs, defence cuts) components of a common process (i.e. an ideologically driven land privatization) or more discrete parts in a complex state restructuring?
The New Enclosure suggests the former, claiming that land privatization is a core, and overlooked, part of neoliberal Britain. Thatcher's right-to-buy, Royal Air Force base closures and the privatization of railway infrastructure fall into the same narrative. Christophers’ critical political economy approach leaves the reader with little doubt about how to evaluate this process. Elites have used neoliberal reforms to profit from land privatization and extend social inequalities. For the most part, I would agree that this story makes a lot of sense. And yet, the empiricism and theoretical nuance Christophers insists upon in the early part of the book comes back to haunt. It is hard to avoid asking if we can really lump all the land privatizations into one critical framing. For example, it is not clear to me whether the sale of defence bases throughout Britain can be assessed in a meaningful way alongside the sale of social housing or the privatization of the railways. Yes, they have all involved a movement of land assets from public to private hands, but this distinction seems to only take us so far. They all have their own problems and politics. Perhaps, then, the reason why Britain's radical shift in landownership has received little attention is that the book's headline-grabbing figure (8 per cent of Britain's landmass) is constituted by a variety of distinct processes.
The New Enclosure does an excellent job of documenting a radical shift in Britain's landownership. By any measure, such a dramatic transfer of public lands into private ownership demands scholarly attention. Christophers’ book therefore represents a significant piece of scholarship and I am extremely pleased a geographer wrote it. And yet, at least for me, the book ultimately failed to live up to its early promises. A multitude of controversial and complex restructurings are slowly folded into a restrictive narrative, leaving little breathing room for the empirical and political questioning that Christophers himself suggests is necessary to understand social and geographical change.
