EVENT
Enclosure Movement
The centuries-long conversion of English common land to private property — North's canonical illustration that institutional voids get filled by those with the political resources to shape the rules in their favor, regardless of the distributional consequences for those excluded from the design.
The enclosure movement was the gradual conversion of common land — land used collectively by rural communities under customary rights — to private property under exclusive ownership, occurring in England from the late medieval period through the nineteenth century. The process accelerated dramatically in the eighteenth century through Parliamentary enclosure acts that authorized private consolidation of previously common fields, commons, and wastes. North invoked the enclosure movement as a canonical illustration of how institutional change occurs during voids and whose interests are served by the arrangements that emerge. The enclosures were economically efficient in aggregate — enclosed land was more productive than common land — but the distributional consequences were devastating for the commoners who lost their traditional access to resources essential to their subsistence.
The institutional void created by the dissolution of common rights was filled by the actors with the most resources — landowners possessing the political connections to secure Parliamentary