Radical commons discourse and the challenges of colonialism

Radical History Review

Volumn , Issue 108, 2010, Pages 29-48

  Maddison, Ben ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 78049343813     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2010-002     Document Type: Article

References (119)

1. Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons," 1968, available at www.garretthardin society.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html.
2. The printed version is Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science 162 (1968): 1243-1248; quoted phrases are found on 1247.
3. Hardin, "Tragedy of the Commons," 1245.
4. Jeanette Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure, and Social Change in England, 1700 - 1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1-52.
5. The foundation work here is J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer (1911; London: Longmans, 1966).
6. Some of the key subsequent works are E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane, 1975);
7. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1963);
8. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972);
9. Eric John Hobsbawm and George Rude, Captain Swing (Surrey, UK: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969);
10. Jane Humphries, "Enclosure, Common Rights, and Women: The Proletarianization of Families in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries," Journal of Economic History 50 (1990): 17-42;
11. Peter King, "Gleaners, Farmers, and the Failure of Legal Sanction in England, 1750 - 1850," Past and Present, no. 125 (1989): 116 -150;
12. Peter King, "Customary Rights and Women's Earnings: The Importance of Gleaning to the Rural Labouring Poor," Economic History Review 44 (1991): 461-476.
13. Irene M. Spry, "The Tragedy of the Loss of the Commons in Western Canada," in As Long as the Sun Shines and Water Flows: A Reader in Canadian Native Studies, ed. Ian A. L. Getty and Antoine S. Lussier (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983), 203-228;
14. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983);
15. Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (London: Oxford University Press, 1989).
16. Leigh Shaw-Taylor, "The Management of Common Land in the Lowlands of Southern England circa 1500 to circa 1850," in The Management of Common Land in North West Europe, ed. Martine de Moor, Shaw-Taylor, and Paul Warde (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2002), 59-86, 68;
17. Gregory Clark and Anthony Clark, "Common Rights to Land in England, 1475 - 1839," Journal of Economic History 61 (2001): 1009-1036.
18. Kathleen Biddick, "Medieval English Peasants and Market Involvement," Journal of Economic History 45 (1985): 823-831
19. Gregory Clark, "Commons Sense: Common Property Rights, Efficiency, and Institutional Change," Journal of Economic History 58 (1998): 73-102, 100
20. Leigh Shaw-Taylor, "Parliamentary Enclosure and the Emergence of an English Agricultural Proletariat," Journal of Economic History 61 (2001): 640-662
21. Leigh Shaw-Taylor, "Labourers, Cows, Common Rights, and Parliamentary Enclosure: The Evidence of Contemporary Comment c. 1760-1810," Past and Present, no. 171 (2001): 95-126.
22. To appreciate this complexity and its chronological and spatial differentiations, see Joan Thirsk, "The Common Fields" and "The Origin of the Common Fields," in Peasants, Knights and Heretics: Studies in Medieval English Social History, ed. Rodney Hilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 10-32, 51 - 56.
23. For a wider European view of diversity and complexity, see de Moor, Shaw-Taylor and Warde, Management of Common Land in North West Europe.
24. A good sense of the restrictiveness and exclusivity can be found in Alan Everitt, "Common Land," in The English Rural Landscape, ed. Joan Thirsk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 210-235;
25. Angus Winchester, The Harvest of the Hills: Rural Life in Northern England and the Scottish Borders, 1400 - 1700 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 32, 78-80, 123;
26. Steve Hindle, "Not by Bread Only'?: Common Right, Parish Relief, and Endowed Charity in a Forest Economy, c. 1600 - 1800," in The Poor in England 1700 - 1850: An Economy of Makeshifts, ed. Steven King and Alannah Tomkins (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003): 39-75, esp. 49 - 54, 62.
27. Levancy and couchancy was the right to depasture the same number of stock on the common as a commoner could sustain on their own land during winter, when access to common pasture was closed. Rights of turbary were rights to take peat for fuel. Estovers was the right to take bracken and ferns, or live wood for building repairs. For the intricacies and regional specificities and language of the manorial commons system
28. see Thirsk, "Common Fields" and "Origin of the Common Fields."
29. See H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution, ed. Christopher Hill (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961), index entry "Norman Conquest Myth." See also Christopher Hill, ed., Winstanley: The Law of Freedom and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 37;
30. John C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650 - 1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006), 65, for a description of the pre-Norman allodial system.
31. Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 24.
32. "The Great Charter of the Forest," in Linebaugh, Magna Carta Manifesto, 300, para. 16.
33. For these statutes, see Dennis Hardy, Alternative Communities in Nineteenth Century England (London: Longman, 1979), 68;
34. Jean Birrell, "Common Rights in the Medieval Forest: Disputes and Conflicts in the Thirteenth Century," Past and Present, no. 117 (1987):42, 48.
35. Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London: Methuen, 1977), 205, 223, 230.
36. A good outline of these revolts is given in J. F. C. Harrison, The English Common People: A History from the Norman Conquest to the Present (Beckenham, UK: Croom Helm, 1984), 119-132.
37. Also see Jane Whittle, "Peasant Politics and Class Consciousness: The Norfolk Rebellions of 1381 and 1549 Compared," Past and Present, no. 195, supp. 2 (2007): 233-247.
38. The quotation is from Harrison, The English Common People, 132. For the Midland Rising, also see Hill, Winstanley, 21.
39. M. E. Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure: Its Historical Geography and Economic History (Folkestone, UK: William Dawson and Sons, 1980);
40. J. R. Wordie, "The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500 - 1914," Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 37 (1983): 491.
41. Harrison comments on how historians are often forced to interpret peasant actions because of the absence of direct evidence of peasant consciousness in prerevolutionary England; Harrison, The English Common People, 15-18, 28 - 30.
42. Keith Thomas, "Another Digger Broadside," Past and Present, no. 42 (1969): 58.
43. Hill, Winstanley, 55.
44. For Winstanley's biography, see David Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War: A Study of the Social Philosophy of Gerrard Winstanley (London: V. Gollancz, 1940), chaps. 3 - 6; also see Hill, Winstanley, 10-12, 31 - 34.
45. George H. Sabine, ed., The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, with an Appendix of Documents relating to the Digger Movement (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 4-11, gives a detailed appreciation of Winstanley's embeddedness in contemporary religion.
46. Sabine, Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 13, notes that "enclosure of common land to the detriment of the poor was a grievance commonly condemned by Leveller petitions in 1647 and 1648." The quotation is from "The Case of the Armie," October 1647, para. 12, in The Leveller Tracts 1647 - 1653, ed. William Haller and Godfrey Davies (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964): 82. For another example, see "An Appeal," in Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New York: Cass, 1967): 194. Wolfe notes that this demand was "certainly incidental to the Leveller program";
47. Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution, 280.
48. See Georg Lukacs, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," sec. 3, in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingston (London: Merlin, 1971): 83-222, 157 - 59, 184, 191.
49. "A Letter to the Lord Fairfax," in Sabine, Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 289;
50. "A Declaration of the Grounds and Reasons why we, the Poor Inhabitants of the Town of Wellingborough. have begun and give consent to dig up, manure and sow corn upon the Common" (1650) was the collective work of nine Diggers who had established a community on the common;
51. Sabine, Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 649-651.
52. "A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England," June 1, 1649, in Hill, Winstanley, 104 ("we resolve"), 107 ("the earth"), 133 ("for and in behalf");
53. "A Letter to the Lord Fairfax," in Sabine, Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 289;
54. "Appeale to All English-men," in Sabine, Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 410.
55. See "Declaration from Wellingborough," in Sabine, Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 650;
56. Thomas, "Another Digger Broadside," 61.
57. "Declaration from Wellingborough," 650.
58. "A Watch-Word to the City of London, and the Army," in Hill, Winstanley, 133;
59. "The Law of Freedom in a Platform," in Hill, Winstanley, 311-312.
60. Hill, Winstanley, 54 - 56, identifies Winstanley's use of the "Norman yoke" argument.
61. "The Law of Freedom," 283.
62. "A New Year's Gift for the Parliament and Armie," Hill, Winstanley, 181-203;
63. "The Law of Freedom," 184;
64. "An Appeale to the House of Commons," 117.
65. "A Declaration from the Poor," 107;
66. "The Law of Freedom," 286.
67. "The Law of Freedom," 282, 287.
68. Ibid., 285.
69. "A Watchword to the City of London," 137;
70. "The Law of Freedom," 295.
71. "The True Leveller's Standard Advanced," 91.
72. "The Law of Freedom," 385, 383.
73. "A New Year's Gift," 201.
74. "A New Year's Gift," 182;
75. "The Law of Freedom," 282.
76. "The True Levellers' Standard," 78, 93.
77. "An Appeal to the House of Commons," 113;
78. "The True Levellers' Standard," 86.
79. "An Appeal to the House of Commons," 116.
80. "The Law of Freedom," 301.
81. For ruling-class attacks on Digger communities, see Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy, chap. 4.
82. "The Law of Freedom," 322.
83. Very little has to this date been written about the history of the Australian commons, but see Joseph Powell, The Public Lands of Australia Felix: Settlement and Land Appraisal in Victoria 1834 - 1891, with Special Reference to the Western Plains (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1970), 80-82;
84. K. W. Robinson, "Land," in The Economic Growth of Australia 1788 - 1821, ed. G. J. Abbott and N. B. Nairn (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1969), 98;
85. Ben Maddison, "A Kind of Joy-Bell': Common Land, Wage Work, and the Eight Hours Movement," in The Time of Their Lives: The Eight Hour Day and Working Life, ed. Julie Kimber and Peter Love (Melbourne: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 2007), 181-196;
86. T. M. Perry, Australia's First Frontier: 1788 - 1829 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1963), 85.
87. "Forbes Municipal Council to Minister for Lands," May 31, 1888, New South Wales State Archives (NSWSA), Kingswood, 88/6592.
88. Brian Donahue, The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 73-86, 110, 123.
89. David J. Grettler, "Designed by Providence for General Use': Freshwater Resources and Local Government in Nineteenth Century Delaware," Transactions of the Delaware Academy of Science 20 (1992-1993): 1-13.
90. Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 170.
91. Evocative descriptions of the dwellings and the general mode of life in gold-seeking camps can be found in Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria 1851 - 1861 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1963), chap. 4.
92. William Howitt, Land, Labour, and Gold; or, Two Years in Victoria and Van Diemen's Land, 2 vols. (1855; Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1972) 2:15.
93. "The Land Law (Petition of H. W. S. Edmunds.)," Votes and Proceedings of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly (V&PNSWLA), 1883 (third session), 861-867.
94. Mayor of Forbes to the Minister for Lands, January 30, 1883, NSWSA, 83/1623.
95. "Petition to the Hon Richard Heales Esq, President of the Board of Land and Works, elbourne, August 26th, 1863," Horsham File, Public Record Office of Victoria (PROV), 0242/P0000/220.
96. Select Committee on Maitland Pasturage Reserve, Minutes of Evidence, V&PNSWLA, 1859-60, 761 - 70, q. 100 - 112.
97. Mr. W.E. Swan to the Secretary for Lands, Nundle, 25 April, 1892, V&PNSWLA, 1892, vol. 6, 758.
98. Report from the Select Committee on the Ham Common Resumption Bill, V&PNSWLA, 1870, 839-857. Minutes of Evidence, Appendix A 1, 856 - 7, introduction.
99. Select Committee on Maitland Pasturage Reserve, Minutes of Evidence, V&PNSWLA, 1859-1860, 766, q. 115.
100. R. G. Ely, Postmaster to the Hon Minister of Lands, July 15th, 1877, PROV, 00242/ P0000/000249.
101. William Brown to the Land Officer, Tallangatta Land Board, April 29, 1897, PROV, Beechworth File, 00242/P0000/002.
102. Goldfields (Reserve at Solferino), V&PNSWLA, 1875-1876, vol. 6, 645 - 67, items 23, 24.
103. Goldfields (Reserve at Solferino), V&PNSWLA, 1875-1876, vol. 6, 645 - 67, item 52.
104. Crown Lands (Return Respecting Application by Messrs. Robson and Schofield for Annual Leases at Nundle and Grant for Common for Residents of Happy Valley), V&PNSWLA, 1892-1893, vol. 8, 749 - 61, no. 11 [enclosure], no. 18, no. 22.
105. W. W. Darke to the Honourable Sir John Robertson, Minister for Lands, NSWSA, 77/891.
106. The phrase is from David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 4. A recent example that tends toward this subsumption is Linebaugh, Magna Carta Manifesto, chap. 11.
107. For some suggestive connections, see Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pts. 1 and 2.
108. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000), chap. 4. Banner, Possessing the Pacific, 226 - 27, discovered the example of Lucius Edelbute in colonial British Columbia. Banner also provides examples of shared indigenous/nonindigenous communities in the early frontier experiences across many colonial locales;
109. Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 70-71, 192.
110. Weaver, The Great Land Rush, 18, 73, adds to this an analysis of frontiers.
111. Darryl Tonkin and Helen Landon, Jackson's Track: A Memoir of a Dreamtime Place (Melbourne: Penguin, 2003), is an illuminating Australian example, albeit from the twentieth century.
112. James Boyce, Van Diemen's Land (Melbourne: Black, 2008), pts. 1 and 2 offers some suggestive possibilities.
113. Banner, Possessing the Pacific, chap. 1.
114. Rodney Harrison, Shared Landscapes: Archaeologies of Attachment and the Pastoral Industry in New South Wales (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2004), 88.
115. For Wellington, see "Home Was Never So Sweet" and "Local Kooris Going Home," Wellington Times, July 31, 2000.
116. For Wilcannia see Pete Thompson, personal communication, Coonabarabran, NSW, March 29, 2009.
117. 'Report of Inspector of Stock to Department of Lands, 12 December 1924," File 39, Batemans Bay, A6180.5, NSWSA.
118. I have developed this critique considering the arguments of Sue Stanton, "Workshop Introduction: Colonists and the Colonised - On Common Ground?" (paper presented at the Colonial Commons Workshop, Faculty of Arts, University of Wollongong, June 2006);
119. Glen Coulthard, "From 'Blood and Fire' to the 'Politics of Recognition': Marx and Fanon on Primitive Accumulation in a Liberal-Settler State" (paper presented at "Colonial Commons: Land/Law/Living/Labour," University of British Columbia, May 2008).