The New Enclosure

Reviews / Votes

The biggest privatisation of all isn't housing, railways, or utilities, but the oldest source of oligarchic power - land. In this clear, readable, accessible and maddening book, Brett Christophers makes clear the massive mismanagement, waste, opacity and centralisation of wealth that has resulted. Necessary reading for anyone who wants to know where ruling class power comes from, and how to take it back. -- Owen Hatherley The detailed case for an English Land Commission, and the need for so many other new radical ideas not yet even first thought of. Why don't we surround London and fill the Home Counties with National Parks where the landowner has to look after the footpaths and cycle paths and over which we all have a right to roam? The New Enclosure raises, but does not yet answer the question of from where the new commons will arise. -- Danny Dorling (don't use on cover) This book forcefully explains how land ownership matters today. The New Enclosure combines a systematic analysis of the role of land and landownership in capitalist society with a compelling critique of neoliberalism in Britain. Christophers demonstrates that recent decades have seen a massive transfer of public land into private control. He documents the overwhelmingly negative and unjust consequences of this new process of enclosure and demolishes the ideology of privatization upon which it is based. No one who cares about the politics of land can ignore this powerful argument. -- David Madden British taxpayers have been robbed blind by the recent fire sale of GBP400 pounds of public land. Like Henry VIII's destruction of the monasteries, Thatcher's privatisation frenzy has led to the destruction of public assets unprecedented amongst leading economies, and to the enrichment of landowners and financiers. In this comprehensive and rigorously researched book, Brett Christophers opens up a field of study - public land - largely buried by academia, landowners and no doubt, by financiers. A must-read. -- Ann Pettifor Praise for Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction

In an era when the term economic geography is bandied about, evacuated of any clear meaning, this book provides students with a trenchant introduction to this academic discipline, and thus to how its practitioners make sense of major features of our contemporary world. Path-breaking, ecumenical, acknowledging warts and exhuming bodies, and insightful about topics ranging from global finance to Alaska pollock, it engagingly narrates the meaning of contemporary Anglophone critical economic geography. -- Eric Sheppard, UCLA Praise for Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction

This is a new and remarkably refreshing way of writing an economic geography textbook. It starts with 'the basics,' but not the usual basics. Instead, there is a discussion of critical thinking and another section that looks at 'what is theory and what does it do.' Why didn't anyone think of this before? It will be a huge help to students and professors alike. -- Erica Schoenberger, Johns Hopkins Praise for The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law

The Great Leveler is a brilliant rethinking of a century and a half of U.S. and English economic history. It is a must read for all scholars of political economy. -- Fred Block, University of California, Davis Praise for The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law

This is a tremendous and important scholarly work. The choice of three periods and two complementary kinds of competition (or monopoly) law is inspired and provides seriously insightful analysis of the contrasting dynamics of competition and monopoly at the level of the corporate form, market price formation, and abuse of market power. -- Bob Jessop, Lancaster University Praise for Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism

An innovative, well-researched and invaluable book on the importance of banks and banking to contemporary capitalism. The vital importance of their cross-boundary activity and the controversy over whether and how they really do contribute to the wealth of nations are here illuminated in novel ways. -- David Harvey Praise for Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism

Banking Across Boundaries is a theoretically precise and empirically meticulous work of political economy that grapples seriously with the large-scale spatial patterns and dynamics of capitalist development and adds to our knowledge and understanding of them. It belongs on the shelf with works such as Harvey's Limits to Capital (1982), Henderson's California and the Fictions of Capital(1998), and Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century (1994). Banking Across Boundaries should be read not just by economic geographers, political economists, or those concerned with the financial crisis, but by anyone who wants to understand key aspects of the global economy. -- James McCarthy, Clark University Praise for Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism


A trenchant, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the reciprocal relationship between economic ideas and material developments in banking and finance. In a book sure to make economists and ordinary citizens rethink the recent financial crisis, Christophers demands that we take the long historical view and place national economies in a global context. This is a fresh, exciting, and probing call for more expansive frames of economic analysis and more critical reflection on the data that allow us to know what we think we know about productivity and finance. -- Mary Poovey, NYU Praise for Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television

Television today is a major locus for the organization of knowledge, the accumulation of capital, and the exercise of power. Envisioning Media Power offers a forceful and insightful examination of how these processes interact. The book should be read by anyone interested in rethinking the ways the media industries have given contemporary political economy some of its most distinctive political and financial forms. -- Timothy Mitchell, Columbia University Christophers's approach to this underexplored facet of British neoliberalism is weighty, comprehensive and outraged. His depiction of this process as the 'New Enclosure' consciously echoes historic anger at the injustices of the first enclosures of the early modern period. -- Julian Dobson, <i>The Town Planning Review</i>