Alberto Ganis
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

According to Merriam-Webster, an enclosure can be defined as the act or action of enclosing, or the quality or state of being enclosed. It also refers to the legal process in England of consolidating (enclosing) small landholdings into larger farms, where the land’s use became restricted to the owner, and it ceased to be common land (Polanyi, 2001). The concept of enclosure relies on its connection with the idea of border, which is simply understood as an outer part or edge of something. Yet, the sociopolitical as well as economic reverberances of borders are everything but simplistic. According to Alessandro Mezzadra (2013) different kinds of borders are experienced in different ways based on belonging to different social groups’ experience. Borders also perform ‘‘several functions of demarcation and territorialization—between distinct social exchanges or flows, between distinct rights, and so forth. Without the world-configuring function they perform, there would be no borders—or no lasting borders’’ (Balibar in Mezzadra 2013, 4). The development of capitalism as a world system has articulated the demarcations generated by economic processes and the borders of the state. An early example of this interconnectedness between capital and borders is represented by enclosures. The consolidation of holdings for private use epitomized the surge of the interests of the rich against the ones of the poor. By doing this: 

the lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of violence, often by pressure and intimidation. They were literally robbing the poor of their share in the common, tearing down the houses which, by the hitherto unbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regarded as theirs and their heirs. (Polanyi 2001, 37)

The establishment of these physical borders around property signify capitalist interests, and go beyond the mere existence of a physical wall. Enclosures offer an example of how borders affect social relations through regulating access to resources as well as speeding up or slowing down different flows simultaneously. In other words, the same border can enhance flows of capital while interfering with flows of labor forces, inevitably affecting poor and rich people differently. Another socioeconomic manifestation of borders is within the stratification of the labor force itself; “often it seems as if skilled and unskilled migrants occupy different universes of migration, living in parallel worlds where the experiences and political stakes of their mobilities are radically incongruous” (Mezzadra, 2013, 137).

(See Enclave, Europe, De/Reterritorialization, Sovereignty)

Bibliography

Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Beacon Press, 2001.