Enclosure in Israel and Palestine

In developments close to home, the latest issue of the New York Review of Books has a review by Raja Shehadeh of Gary Fields's Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror (U. California Press, 2017). Some excerpts:

Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, a series of legal developments in the Ottoman Empire—which ruled Palestine until 1917—had enabled the growth of... large land holdings. They included the promulgation of the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, which attempted to eliminate the musha system, whereby land was held in common, and required that the cultivator-turned-owner register his land with Treasury officials.

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The legal processes the Ottomans had begun were continued in the years after the end of their rule—first by the British military occupation of Palestine from 1917 to 1922, and then when the League of Nations granted the British a mandate over Palestine from 1922 to 1948. During both periods, the British continued to revise the land laws with a view to making the land more marketable and facilitating its sale to the Zionists. Among the British figures whose ideas provided the foundation for British land policy in Palestine was Sir Ernest Dowson, who believed that what the Palestinian fellah, or peasant, needed was “enclosure and partition of the common fields.”

In his book..., Gary Fields defines enclosure as “a practice resulting in the transfer of land from one group of people to another and the establishment of exclusionary spaces on territorial landscapes.” Dowson was intent on creating blocks of property that could be surveyed and registered with the Mandate Land Authority. Mandate authorities also sought to repeal the musha system. British officials were convinced that the enclosure of common land, which had already been implemented in England, had brought about “improvement” and “progress,” and they sought to replicate it in Palestine.

This British policy represented a victory for the Zionist movement. It made it possible for more Palestinian land to be sold to Zionist Jews. 

Enclosure Norwegian style

The International Journal of the Commons recently published "On enclosure Norwegian style", by Erling Berge and Anne Sigrid Haugset. The abstract:

More than 200 years after the King sold one of the “King’s commons” to urban timber merchants, local people in some ways still behave as if the area is a kind of commons. The paper outlines the history of the transformation of the area from an 18th century King’s commons to a 21st century battleground for ideas about ancient access and use rights of community members facing rights claimed by a commercial forest owner within local consequences of national legislation. The discussion is focused on the right of common to hunt small game without dog in Follafoss private commons. The right was confirmed in a judgement of the Supreme Court in 1937 and in legislation on hunting in 1951. The Government’s proposal for new legislation on hunting in 1981 removed the right without saying a word about it, and it was never commented on in parliament during the legislative process. To explain what we observe it is suggested that a new layer of legislation on rights of common from 1857 and 1863 created a structural amnesia about private commons making it easy to remove them from legislation.

Environmental effects of enclosure

April's Environmental History has a review by David Zylberberg of Shirley Wittering's Ecology and Enclosure: The Effect of Enclosure on Society, Farming and the Environment in South Cambridgeshire, 1798-1850 (Oxbow, 2013). There is a lot of theoretical writing on the environmental effects of enclosure; this book seems to provide some real environmental-historical data. Zylberberg writes that Wittering:

is able to demonstrate the adaptability of open-field agriculture and refute some of its eighteenth- and twentieth-century critics. It is refreshing to read a discussion of enclosure that focuses on the actual crops planted rather than trying to extrapolate agricultural change from rental values or the intellectual history of improvement. Moreover, this focus demonstrates that the agricultural changes that followed enclosure in South Cambridgeshire increased the number of sheep that could be pastured but did not lead to higher grain yields.

The chapter on the ecological consequences of enclosure is the most original and of interest to environmental historians. Wittering uses the notes of Cambridge botanists, maps, and receipts of timber sales to trace the presence and location of plant species. She is able to demonstrate that the location of trees changed as many older ones were cut down to pay for enclosure while hedges were planted along field boundaries. Another major contribution comes from comparing the grass and flower species in fields at various dates. In this regard, she can demonstrate the loss of heathland flowers and bird habitat as former sheep pastures were plowed up to plant grain following enclosure. Current efforts to preserve characteristically English environments and reintroduce fauna will benefit from these holistic descriptions of Cambridgeshire ecology. 

Swidler reviews "Custom, Improvement, and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain"

The latest issue (April 2013) of Environmental History has a number of book reviews that may be of interest to readers. Eva-Maria Swidler reviews a collection of essays edited by Richard W Hoyle, entitled Custom, Improvement, and the Landscape in Early Modern Britian (Ashgate, 2011).