New conceptions of property were also being theorized more systematically, most famously in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Chapter 5 of that work is the classic statement of a theory of property based on the principles of improvement. Here, property as a “natural” right is based on what Locke regards as the divine injunction to make the earth productive and profitable, to improve it. The conventional interpretation of Locke’s theory of property suggests that labor establishes the right to property, but a careful reading of Locke’s chapter on property makes it clear that what really is at issue is not labor as such but the productive and profitable utilization of property, its improvement. An enterprising, improving landlord establishes his right to property not by his own direct labor but by the productive exploitation of his land and other people’s labor on it. Unimproved land, land not rendered productive and profitable (such as the lands of indigenous peoples in the Americas), is “waste,” and it is the right, even the duty, of improvers to appropriate it.

The same ethic of improvement could be used to justify certain kinds of dispossession not only in the colonies but at home in England. This brings us to the most famous redefinition of property rights: enclosure. Enclosure is often thought of as simply the privatization and fencing in of formerly common land, or of the “open fields” that characterized certain parts of the English countryside. But enclosure meant, more particularly, the extinction (with or without a physical fencing of land) of common and customary use-rights on which many people depended for their livelihood.

The first major wave of enclosure occurred in the sixteenth century, when larger landowners sought to drive commoners off lands that could be profitably put to use as pasture for increasingly lucrative sheep farming. Contemporary commentators held enclosure, more than any other single factor, responsible for the growing plague of vagabonds, those dispossessed “masterless men” who wandered the countryside and threatened social order. The most famous of these commentators, Thomas More, though himself an encloser, described the practice as “sheep devouring men.” These social critics, like many historians after them, may have overestimated the effects of enclosure alone, at the expense of other factors leading to the transformation of English property relations. But it remains the most vivid expression of the relentless process that was changing not only the English countryside but the world: the birth of capitalism.

Enclosure continued to be a major source of conflict in early modern England, whether for sheep or increasingly profitable arable farming. Enclosure riots punctuated the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and enclosure surfaced as a major grievance in the English Civil War. In its earlier phases, the practice was to some degree resisted by the monarchical state, if only because of the threat to public order. But once the landed classes had succeeded in shaping the state to their own changing requirements—a success more or less finally consolidated in 1688, in the so-called “Glorious Revolution”—there was no further state interference, and a new kind of enclosure movement emerged in the eighteenth century, the so-called Parliamentary enclosures. In this kind of enclosure, the extinction of troublesome property rights that interfered with some landlord’s powers of accumulation took place by acts of Parliament. Nothing more neatly testifies to the triumph of agrarian capitalism.

So in England, a society in which wealth still derived predominantly from agricultural production, the self-reproduction of both major economic actors in the agrarian sector—direct producers and the appropriators of their surpluses—were, at least from the sixteenth century, increasingly dependent on what amounted to capitalist practices: the maximization of exchange value by means of cost-cutting and improving productivity, by specialization, accumulation, and innovation.

This mode of providing for the basic material needs of English society brought with it a whole new dynamic of self-sustaining growth, a process of accumulation and expansion very different from the age-old cyclical patterns that dominated material life in other societies. It was also accompanied by the typical capitalist processes of expropriation and the creation of a propertyless mass. It is in this sense that we can speak of “agrarian capitalism” in early modern England.