Against Enclosure: The Commoners Fight Back
By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism
In these and many other battles, commoners heroically fought to preserve their land and rights, but they were unable to stop the growth of a highly-profitable industry that was supported physically by the state and legally by the courts. As elsewhere, capital defeated the commons.
Fossil fuel cuts: Promises vs plans
By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism
The fossil fuel production gap — the difference between global fossil fuel production projected by governments’ plans (red line) and those consistent with 1.5°C- and 2°C-warming pathways (blue and green lines), as expressed in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions released when the extracted fuels are burned — remains large.
Dispossessed: Origins of the Working Class
By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism
The social order that capital’s apologists defend as inevitable and eternal is “the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.” Acceptance of the wages-system as a natural way to live and work did not happen easily.
Against Enclosure: The Commonwealth Men
By Ian Angus, Climate & Capitalism
Enclosure — the transformation of common resources into private property — was a fundamental feature of the rise of capitalism in early modern England. It involved not only new ways of using the land, but also, as both cause and effect, new ways of thinking about it.
Robbing the Soil, 2: ‘Systematic theft of communal property’
By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism
The radical changes known to history by the innocuous name enclosure peaked in two long waves: during the rise of agrarian capitalism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and during the consolidation of agrarian capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth.
Robbing the soil, 1: Commons and classes before capitalism
By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism
Between the decline of feudalism and the rise of industrial capitalism, rural society was transformed by the complex of processes that are collectively known as enclosure.
Intensive Fishing and the Birth of Capitalism, Part 4
By Ian Angus, Climate & Capitalism
My goal, rather, is to draw attention to an important aspect of early capitalism that has been almost entirely ignored by all of the participants: the development and growth of intensive fishing in the North Sea and northwestern Atlantic Ocean in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Intensive Fishing and the Birth of Capitalism, Part 3
By Ian Angus, Climate and Capitalism
But for the merchants who were the primary promoters, financiers and often warriors on the English side, it was an economic war — if they had read von Clausewitz, they might have said that their war was business conducted by other means.