According to James Boyle, a law professor at Duke University, ours is the era of the ‘second enclosure’. The first enclosure largely took place between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, as lands once held in common – fields used for grazing cattle, forests used to forage for wood – were taken into the hands of private owners through a series of enclosure acts. Many economists argue the enclosure movement laid the ground for the industrial revolution, allowing farmland to be used more productively. But it was a drawn-out and often violent process – one that destroyed the social
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