This chapter discusses the larger implications of Sanhe gods’ experiences. It analyzes the various forms of their resistance, from non-compliance to direct confrontation, and the state’s mechanisms of control, from gentrification to coercion. It ends with a discussion on Sanhe gods’ precarious future, as flexible employment becomes more widespread and the prospects for settling down in cities reduce even when the great gods have intentions to stay. It presents migrant workers’ experiences not only of factory hopping but also, and increasingly, of city hopping, as both livelihood strategies and coping strategies formed in response to state policies and repression.

This chapter discusses the design of zoo enclosures and briefly considers important stages in the history of zoo design. Animals must be safely contained within zoos and the nature of the containment varies between species. From time to time containment methods fail and animals escape, sometimes with fatal consequence for them and the people they encounter. There is an ongoing debate about the appropriate amount of space required for some species, especially large carnivores and other wide-ranging taxa. Minimum space requirements for taxa are arbitrarily determined, and usable space and enclosure shape should be considered when enclosures are designed. A number of studies have examined enclosure use by zoo animals, the need for shade and an appropriate substratum. Visitor behaviour may affect enclosure use in some taxa. Enclosure design is a compromise between the need that animals have to avoid the gaze of the public and the desire of visitors to see the animals.

Row upon row of Victorian terraced houses in areas such as Romsey testify to the huge expansion of Cambridge in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The author shows how the growth of town and University was hastened by the enclosure of the medieval open fields, the arrival of the railway in 1845 and long overdue reforms to the University. The population of the University swelled as it finally opened its doors to scholars of different religions in 1856, and to women in 1869. The author looks at pioneer women at Newnham and Girton, the first Black students, and the first academic wives permitted in Cambridge. The role of University abolitionists and campaigners such as Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and Olaudah Equiano are also explored. When the Duke of Devonshire founded the Cavendish Laboratory, there followed a tremendous period of scientific advance which included the discovery of the electron and neutron and splitting of the atom, led by J. J. Thomson, Rutherford and Chadwick. Significant individuals such as Darwin, Wittgenstein, Keynes, Virginia Woolf and poet Rupert Brooke are also included, as are the charms of Grantchester Meadows and the Orchard Tea Garden.

This chapter introduces the multiple roles of marine protected areas using the language of the commons. After introducing how international biodiversity law uses commons' language, it attempts to discuss two main characterisations of marine protected areas: marine protected areas as regulatory tools for common-pool resources and marine protected area as institutional sites for supporting or hindering commoning practices. The discussion draws on three principal strands of social science literature: political ecology to show how rational and scientific interventions are always political, geographical literature to discuss the meaning of territory and uncover the more-than-human elements in the analysis of conservation intervention and most crucially, the literature on commons, which spans from the more traditional Ostromian analysis of common-pool resources to the more recent and politicised literature on commoning. Investigating the relationships between marine protected areas and commons is an essential preliminary step to enable a critical discussion of how English law and regulation conceptualises marine protected areas and contributes to the formation of marine protected areas as spaces of opening and/or closing.

In the seventeenth century, the economic center of Europe shifted from Italy to northwestern Europe, because of technological advances, institutions that promoted capital accumulation, and stronger networks of exchange in a booming Atlantic economy. The lack of all these made eastern Europe the least prosperous part of the continent. In western Europe, new crops and crop rotation patterns, improved livestock breeding, the draining of marshes, and other developments led to significant growth in agricultural productivity, though they were also socially disruptive. Demand for new consumer goods increased, spurring both global trade and local production. With a slight improvement in the climate in the middle of the eighteenth century, along with new food crops, better public health measures, and other factors, the population of Europe began to rise more swiftly than it had beforehand. Many people combined agricultural work with handicraft production, or migrated to cities in search of work, gathering together in manufactories organized by investors. Work increasingly involved the use of machines powered by hand, animals, water, wind, and – by the eighteenth century – coal. This transformation occurred first in cloth production, and then in mining, with negative effects on air quality and the environment.

This introduction sketches the main arguments about the contribution of farming books to the development of agrarian capitalism and lays the groundwork for the detailed argument in later chapters. It first offers a critique of the standard research paradigm, the enlightenment model, which only evaluates the role of books with respect to technological change and is insensitive to early modern social relations. It then explains the research method and scope, focused on British agricultural books printed between 1660 and 1800. Since the structure of the book is thematic, it presents a broad survey of agricultural books and authors to serve as a reference for the rest of the book. It ends by summarising how the core argument is developed over seven chapters.

This conclusion reflects upon the contribution of this study to different spheres of history. First, it considers how the analysis changes our understanding of agricultural books in early modern Britain, by revisiting the advantages of the sociological approach compared with the enlightenment model. It restates the core argument about the enclosure of knowledge in light of the detailed arguments of specific chapters. Second, it suggests that this study opens up space for a new field of research: the social history of agricultural knowledge. It discusses how the current arguments about book-knowledge can be tested, but also how alternative approaches might go beyond the focus on books. Third, it considers the implications for general histories of knowledge and capitalism, which is illustrated through three key concepts: the real subsumption of labour, deskilling and commodification. It argues that the story of early English agricultural literature is not only relevant, but foundational to the history of capitalism in general.

Chapter 1 examines demographic ideas in early Tudor England, centering on connections between the mobility and mutability of particular groups of people. It first delineates sources for demographic ideas, in particular the Bible and Aristotle’s Politics, and emphasizes the centrality of qualitative concerns about multitudes of people as a factor in the health of the polis. It then turns to a major context for English demographic thought, the enclosure of land from the late fifteenth century. It delineates a key theme in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature of agrarian complaint, detailed in More’s Utopia: causal links between enclosure and depopulation (the removal of a functional multitude from a specific locale) and between mobility and degeneration (here, of ploughmen displaced by enclosure into criminals). The final section looks at the development – in Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, Thomas Smith’s Discourse of the Common Weal, and an anonymous set of “Polices” – of an idea of policy centered on restricting mobility to prevent degeneration and maintain proportions and relations between functional multitudes as components of the body politic.

Americans know the story of democracy: how the Framers built a government with branches that would check and balance, that would derive its authority from sovereign citizens, filtered and refined by their elected representatives. Americans may refer to our system as “democracy” but the representative republican framework provided by the Framers ensured the safe democratization of our country over time. This well-rehearsed story frames American democracy as a bequest from the Framers. Yet this powerful founding story is a victor’s tale, designed to erase from collective historical memory a very real battle with a robust alternative model of democratic theory and practice that was flourishing – much to the Framers’ consternation – in the early nation. This alternative democracy originated in the daily practices of ordinary colonists. Their vernacular democracy generated and motored revolution; and though the political elite embraced this participatory and equalitarian practice, they later pulled away, seeking in their words to “tame” the democratic enthusiasm and power of ordinary American citizens even as they drew on that power (renamed “sovereignty”) to authorize the representative federal republicanism they offered as a containment device. Knowing about vernacular democracy enables readers to see its record in the literature of the early United States.

This chapter argues that race-based affirmative action in higher education is an intangible commons where the shared resource is diversity, the members are universities and students, and the individuals who seek to end affirmative action are agents of enclosure.The diversity commons provides insight into the conservation vulnerabilities of other commons resources. When affirmative action faces hostile litigation – universities (i.e., the protectors of the diversity commons) focus solely on diversity arguments.Universities’ interests diverge from minority students when they fail to offer equality based defenses (i.e., that admissions are racially discriminatory).While many members of the commons have overlapping interests, a commons is vulnerable to the extent that commons managers have divergent interests from other members. Conservationists must be aware of a party’s interest when considering who should have authority to defend the commons.In the diversity commons, a possible solution is to grant minority students intervenor status so they can advance equality arguments.This solution, if applied abstractly to other commons, would mean introducing gridlock as a conservation tool.One manifestation of gridlock could be to give all commons members with use rights the power to defend against development and enclosure.

Chapter 1 considers the material and discursive factors which defined the representation of hunger and appetite in the Renaissance theatre. It explores the lived experience of hunger and appetite in early modern England, situating these issues in the context of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It engages with early modern dietaries, religious texts and popular cultural forms such as ballads in order to define the precise nature of early modern attitudes to hunger and appetite. The chapter concludes by considering the practical and theoretical implications of staging hunger and appetite on the Renaissance stage. It focusses on the theatres as places devoted to the sale of both plays and food, and considers the complex and multifaceted relationships of the period’s various audiences with the lived experience of hunger and appetite.

Chapter 3 investigates Burke’s thoughts on the Corn Laws and the enclosure movement. Burke’s support for the corn bounty was one of the rare exceptions in which he defended state intervention in the market. Burke believed that the bounty had made corn cheaper in the long run and empowered the landed interest to compete in the foreign market. I also examine how Burke generally viewed enclosure in a favorable light for encouraging productive agricultural activity; he maintained, however, that the practice should be carried out in a transparent and lawful manner. In addition, I explore broader themes of Burke’s views on the agricultural economy. He held that the rich were the trustees of the poor, and thus possessed the moral resonsibility to aid them in times of need. I further outline his discussion of the varieties of labor in Thoughts and Details, which he used to demonstrate the hazards in establishing a uniform wage regulation that overlooked such differences. I also investigate Burke’s antipathy to wealth redistribution in the grain market. In his judgment, schemes to take wealth from some to give to others would lead to universal poverty, not universal opulence, and would cause social disorder.

This chapter considers the financial management of the English convents in Catholic Europe. It places the convents’ economic dealings in the context of their overall history, underlining just how vital this aspect of convent life was to their very survival and function. This chapter starts by briefly considering the nuns’ devotion to poverty, before exploring some of the necessary expenses accrued by the foundations. The different economic income strands exploited by the English convents is then outlined, before some of the problems they experienced in their finances are explored. The chapter finishes with a consideration of whether the convents were ever able to separate completely from their English roots as far as finances were concerned. Though the English convents adopted similar approaches to financial management as their continental equivalents and were frequently the model of Tridentine economic behaviour, they did face additional problems as a result of their nationality. Ultimately, the English convents existed in a precarious economic zone that could easily fall prey to both domestic and international fluctuations in more than just the economic environment.

The second chapter considers the exile English convents’ commitment to a core tenet of the Council of Trent’s teaching on female religious life: the implementation and maintenance of full enclosure. It opens by detailing the convents’ initiation rites, through the ceremonies of clothing and profession of vows. This chapter considers the relationship between English women religious and enclosure as a touchstone indicator of commitment to the initiatives of the Catholic Reformation. In their dedication to such a major Catholic identifier, it is argued that the English convents did not just match their continental equivalents but even outstripped them, gaining a reputation for their full commitment to this aspect of religious identity. In short, English nuns were committed to the tenets of the Council of Trent, especially those surrounding enclosure. This dedication allowed the nuns to place themselves in the vanguard of new Catholic Reformation initiatives, though this in itself reveals a paradox: for all that they embraced enclosure, the communities were not cut off from the wider world or its perceptions but remained involved with it.