Ashley BOHRER

Rethinking Enclosure from the South:
Primitive Accumulation and the Settler Commons in the History of Global (Racial) Capitalism

This talk complicates a familiar story for anti-capitalist analysis: that the enclosure of land in Europe is the historical precondition for proletarianization and hence, for the rise of capitalism. Nuancing this oft-retold story, I foreground the rise of various forms of colonial enclosure throughout the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese empires, arguing for their central importance in the rise of capitalism as a global system rather than as a fringe economic practice of Northern Europe. I trace both differences across these empires’ styles of imposing enclosure, but I also argue for general continuity across several geographical and cultural contexts. In the first part of this paper, I trace how the imposition of European norms of enclosure on colonized peoples and lands was a central aspect of the rise of global capitalism, setting the stage for economic, political, and ideological practices that sustained the rise and reproduction of colonial capital.
    The second part of this paper traces an often-overlooked element of this history, namely that “enclosures” and “private property” are often (mistakenly) treated synonymously in the literature of the history of capitalism. But in the colonies, especially in settler colonies, enclosed land does not always function as private property. Tracing what I call “collective enclosures” and “settler commons,” I focus on the way that white settlers created racially-exclusive “commons” in the process of colonization. As newly proletarianized workers sought material security, adventure, and autonomy in the colonies (and as others were impressed into naval service or penal transport), they often recreated the feudal commons they had lost access to in Europe – places where one could draw timber, hunt animals, gather fruits and herbs, and use water beyond the limits of one’s own private property. This was true across the Spanish, French, and British Empires in the Western Hemisphere and was equally true of the Dutch in South Africa.
    A crucial difference between the European commons of feudal peasantry and the new capitalist commons of the colony: the latter were bounded around racial and colonial lines. The settler commons were not only built on stolen indigenous land; they also excluded indigenous people from their use, often by threats, intimidation, and violence. These commons were far from “common” in the usual sense; they were specifically not designed for the free and open use of all human beings inhabited their environs. Rather, these colonial commons were a central, spatialized mechanism for bringing into existence a settler sphere and a settler class defined through one’s (projected) descent from Europe, a proto-form of what would be shortly concreted as whiteness.
    Mobilizing an analysis of what Iyko Day has called “romantic anti-capitalism,” I argue that we can see these settler colonial collective enclosures as one material practice that turned European refugees from capitalist devastation into vanguard foot soldiers for capitalist accumulation.

Ashley J. BOHRER holds a PhD in Philosophy and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Gender and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Bohrer's first book, Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism (Columbia University Press, 2019) was short-listed for the Deutscher Prize and will be soon available in both Spanish and Greek. Bohrer's next book, Capitalism and Confinement, is forthcoming with Verso Books. In addition to academic work, Bohrer is an activist and public intellectual; you can access a fuller picture of their work at ashleybohrer.com.