ENCLOSURE AND LABOUR SUPPLY IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Abstract

U T NTIL the advance, a generation ago, in the study of the demographic aspect of the Industrial Revolution, the function of enclosure in regard to labour supply was regarded as crucial. Its special importance in recruiting the industrial labour force was developed in a series of important studies as the result of which it came to be generally regarded as a basic postulate of the new large-scale economy.2 More recent examination of the growth and movement of population has done something to modify this view, but the conventional picture of catastrophic change effected by enclosure continues to find adherents. Any alternative to it, says Mr Maurice Dobb, implies the assumption that 'the appearance of a reserve army of labour was a simple product of growing population which created more hands than could be fed from the then cultivated soil. If this were the true story, one might have reason to speak of a proletariat as a natural rather than an institutional creation and to treat accumulation of capital and the growth of a proletariat as autonomous and independent processes. But this idyllic picture fails to accord with the facts.'3 This formulation of the problem invites discussion on several counts, but from the angle of the regional historian (from which it is viewed here) it generalizes a process which he sees in terms of its separate parts, i.e. as actual movements of population in particular places; and he is impelled by the force of his methodology to test the abstract formula of 'institutional creation' by fitting it to the local facts as he knows them. Such is the purpose of this article; but some clarification of the formula is necessary at the outset.

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