33land

Tim Sharp

replicating structures It is tempting to leave the story here, just another story about a colonial elsewhere, distanced in space and time, a story that, as Herman Merivale of the Colonial Office in London saw clearly, consists of a series “of wretched details of ferocity and treachery”. 3 However, since I remembered reading a quotation from Thomas Spence’s A Lecture read at the Philosophical Society in Newcastle on Nov. 8th 1775, for the printing of which the Society did the Author the Honour to expel him , I wanted to find out if there were relevant patterns already present in the initiating colonial culture. Landowners, says Spence, criticising the status quo: …can, by laws of their own making, oblige every living creature to remove off his property (which to the great distress of mankind, is too often put in execution); so of consequence, were all the landholders to be of one mind, and determined to take their properties into their own hands, all the rest of mankind might go to heaven if they would, for there would be no place found for them here. 4 Spence was not engaged in idle philosophical speculation. What he asserted was written in historical circumstances and conditions which continued into mid- nineteenth century England. He offered a way of considering the background of those colonisers who were so adamant about their racial superiority, fitness to inherit the earth and security of tenure – in other words those, whose instrumentalised racism was, as Hugh Brody puts it, ‘relentless and purposeful”. 5 Spence’s concerns were directed to the commons in England, communal rights of use of land – the grazing, hunting, brick-making and firewood collecting which had been enjoyed by cottagers and villagers from time immemorial, and which were being systematically abrogated by privately-introduced parliamentary legislation — passed, in the main, by the beneficiaries themselves wearing different hats. At times the changes took place quietly and at others, as E P Thompson has shown, it needed all the force of draconic

laws creating innumerable new capital offences (in at least two sense of the word) to establish the new regime. He points out, ‘The Hanoverian Whigs …were a hard lot of men. And they remind us that stability, no less than revolution, may have its own kind of terror’. 6 With many traditional-use rights curtailed and a campaign of systematic enclosures of common land underway, many of those who lived on and from the land lost their independence and were forced into wage labour. For the beneficiaries, this made for more ‘rational’ land use while having the added ‘benefit’ of creating a tide of emigration to the cities to service the growing industries there. It also started a stream of emigration to the colonies that was to last into the twentieth century. Scotland exhibits parallels: after the Jacobite rebellion in 1745 had been quashed, the military potential of the clan system was dismantled. Clansmen were disarmed, the kilt forbidden and clan chiefs were turned into the sole and absolute legal owners of clan estates. The potential increase in wealth represented by lucrative sheep farming and selling wool to the rapidly expanding and well-protected textile industry, proved too great for most clan chiefs leading to the Highland Clearances, the precondition for profitable business and the coercive motivation for many to leave their homeland in search of land and security elsewhere. Looking at those events from the other side of the Atlantic, Lewis Hyde summarises: it was, he says, the same war the American Indians had to fight with the Europeans, a war against the marketing of formerly inalienable properties. Whereas before a man could fish in any stream and hunt in any forest, now he found there were individuals who claimed to be owners of these commons. The basis of land tenure had shifted. 7 In short, the commodification of land and its concentration in a few hands was a qualitatively different way than before.

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