The Commons in History: Culture, Conflict, and Ecology

© 2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wall, Derek.

The commons in history : culture, conflict, and ecology / Derek Wall.

   p.  cm.—(History for a sustainable future)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-02721-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-262-32201-0 (retail e-book)

1. Commons—History. I. Title.

HD1286.W34 2014

333.2—dc23

2013032414

d_r1

To Emily Blyth and Amanda Penfold

What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?

Describe your street. Describe another. Compare.

—Georges Perec, L’Infra-ordinaire (1989)

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

1    Commons Ecology

Overview

Commons, Sustainability, and Environmental History

What Is the Commons?

Contested Commons

The Tragedy of the Commons

Commons as a Solution

Commons History: England, Mongolia, and India

Successful Commons

Ecologically Failed Commons

2    Culture in Common?

Commons as an Economic Solution

Culture as a Means of Conservation

Culture versus Economics

The Gift Economy

Contested Cultures

Misreading the Cultural Commons

3    Commons in Conflict

The Assault on the Commons

Enclosure and Colonization

Ecological Imperialism

The Radical Case for the Commons

Conflicted Commons

Commons, Conflict, and Gender

Continuing Commons

4    Questions for Good Ancestors

How Do We Research the Commons?

How Can the Commons Sustain the Environment?

How Do We Socially Share?

How Do We Fight the Crab?

How Do We Love the Land?

Before Time People

Notes

Selected Readings on the Commons

Index

Foreword

Michael Egan

Derek Wall’s The Commons in History: Culture, Conflict, and Ecology inaugurates a new series from the MIT Press. History for a Sustainable Future is predicated on the idea that scholars, publics, and policymakers need to be conscious of the historical contexts of contemporary environmental problems to understand their social, political, economic, and ecological contexts. Resolving local and global environmental quandaries requires careful thought and planning, and future success depends on a deep appreciation of the past. This is the point of the series: we can learn from past mistakes, but more important, solving the environmental crisis demands the best information available, and history provides valuable insights into the creation and proliferation of the environmental ills we hope to curb.

Fittingly, the commons in history is a good departure point for this series for two reasons. First, the commons constitutes one of the oldest stories of human interaction with the physical environment. The collective use of land and extraction of resources has been engrained in human activities since before history was written down. Second, this story possesses critical contemporary relevance for helping us to move toward a more sustainable future. As Wall notes in his introduction to this book, understanding property rights is essential for understanding sustainability. How we use, share, close off, and open up the land and its resources offers insights into how we value the environment, the economy, and each other. And by applying an historical lens to how the commons have evolved over time and across space, Wall reads a method of engaging with the future.

Wall examines the historical commons to determine what we can learn from the past and how we might use it to inform future deliberations. In so doing, Wall champions the commons but criticizes their enclosure. A commons is land that is set aside for public use and jointly owned and managed by its surrounding community. Use is the key word here. As Brian Donahue notes, to have a real commons [is] something more than enjoying a park, in other words, more than tossing a frisbee on the town green; it requires some means of productive economic engagement.¹ By extension, enclosure (or the blocking of access to commons through the establishment of private property or legal restrictions imposed on some members of the public) constitutes another form of productive economic engagement, but it often comes at the expense of a broader public good. In this respect, when we talk about managing nature, we are talking about managing people, which introduces questions of power and the unequal distribution of access to resources.

As Wall demonstrates, the commons has multiple personalities. In overlapping scenarios, it is a material space organized by a form of local self-governance, an economic abstraction that explores collective resource use, and a practical tool for resource management. More recent practices have also developed a creative commons, which expands the intellectual resources of the information age and can be applied to the production of new ideas, work, and things. As the futurist and technology activist Stewart Brand famously asserted, Information wants to be free.² If blueprints, open-source software, and free and collaborative knowledge collection mark a new era for the information age, then how might we reimagine a transformation of the physical commons by examining it historically?

This question is complicated by the conflicting baggage that travels with the commons as an idea, as an ecological space, and as a management practice. According to its analysts, it is either preternaturally good or intrinsically bad. For its proponents, the commons engenders notions of economic equality, ecological responsibility, and social justice while it encourages community, support, and the collective production of goods. For its detractors, the commons are a naïve and outdated system of land management that fails to address the increasing demands for resources in a growth-driven economy and is wholly inconsistent with the four P’s of capitalism—property, productivity, profit, and progress. In a recent study on the cosmopolitan commons, Nil Disco and Eda Kranakis observe the ahistorical tension in this duality and the importance of situating the commons in time and place.³

This is what Wall does. Throughout The Commons in History, Wall emphasizes that the commons are culturally designed and historically dynamic and that most commons are never put to the test on their own merits. Instead, they are typically enclosed and turned over to private owners For Wall, this is the true tragedy of the commons. His book weaves culture and politics into the traditional economic framework that drives much work on the commons. His wide-ranging examples reveal a certain consistency in the historical analysis.

Sustainability implies hope, and Wall’s history seems to point toward a hopeful rehabilitation of the commons. Since the 1960s, the commons has been derided by neo-Malthusians as a wildly problematic method of land management. Garrett Hardin’s famous essay The Tragedy of the Commons (1968) ushered in a new wave of commons theory. For Hardin, there is no technical solution to the unrestricted open access to the commons: as more people pursue narrow economic self-interests, they put more stresses on the commons until its usefulness is depleted, greater management is imposed on it, or the land is portioned off into private property. No scientific or technological solution exists. Hardin’s interpretation of the commons is an abstraction that is altogether alien to any iteration of the commons throughout history. Because the commons was simply a metaphor, his tragedy is a parable for the new language of Malthusian scarcity on a global scale, and there are no rules to shape its use.⁴ Nevertheless, his essay sparked intense criticism of the idea of shared land use and revived a longstanding theoretical debate on the economics of the commons. In response to Hardin and other critics of the commons, economist and Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom resuscitated the concept of the commons by expounding on the value and importance of common pool resources to past and future cultures.⁵ At the heart of Ostrom’s work is the notion that common-pool resources and the common good share an aversion to exclusion or privatization. They require cooperation, conversation, and the revival of community. For Ostrom, the future of success of the commons rests in the promotion of collective land-use that marries open dialog and participation, social and ecological responsibility, and a chastened appreciation of the current state of global environmental crisis. On this path, Wall and Ostrom see some hope in a more sustainable future.⁶

The history of the commons helps us to envision a more sustainable future on two counts. First, it allows us to analyze the success or failure of a property regime in practice rather than in theory. As Wall argues, There is no value-free yardstick that can define the success or failure of commons.⁷ Historical empiricism offers an effective lens for achieving greater clarity. Merging intellectual and material histories with one eye firmly on contemporary debate, Wall offers up an applied history that will serve students, scholars, policymakers, and activists. In addition, Wall leaves his readers with an important topic for further conversation. Although he concludes that the commons is an important and underused management tool that might sustainably alter how we exploit nature, he questions whether property-rights regimes can be steered effectively in this kind of direction. Good books spur provocative discourse, and Wall provides the context for a vital debate on how to engage the commons as a means of ensuring both social equity and environmental sustainability. Sustainability and the commons are linked by perceptions of time: the commons constitutes one of the oldest and most universal methods of land use, but sustainability looks forward over both short and long time frames. The history lesson of the much-maligned commons might help to encourage more forethought on long-term thinking.

Acknowledgments

The following individuals read drafts, made suggestions, and improved this book—Michel Bauwens, Emily Blyth, Martin Empson, Amanda Penfold, Andrea Claire Smith, Daniel Taghioff, and Dan Whittall. Thank you to James Sheils for preparing the index. The mistakes are all mine.

1 Commons Ecology

London and its environs would have no parks today if commoners had not asserted their rights, and as the nineteenth century drew on rights of recreation were more important than rights of pasture, and were defended vigilantly by the Commons Preservation Society. We owe to these premature Greens such urban lungs as we have. More than that, if it had not been for the stubborn defence by Newbury commoners of their rights to the Greenham Common, where on earth could NATO have parked its Nukes?¹

The siege of Namur in 1695 is perhaps best known from Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy, but it is as good a place as any to start this discussion of the commons in history. In Sterne’s novel, Tristram’s Uncle Toby becomes obsessed with the siege where he received a mysterious groin injury. He builds a large-scale replica of the battle that he shows to his increasingly frustrated fiancée, Widow Wadham. The novel, filmed under the title A Cock and Bull Story, is known for its humor, brilliance, and somewhat insane plot developments, including the romance between the Widow Wadham and Uncle Toby. The real-life siege took place between British and French forces and led to an episode of commoning in Kirk Yetholm, a border town in the north of England, now in Scotland, that was famed for its association with gypsy travelers. During the siege of Namur, a gypsy by the name of Young saved the life of a Captain Bennet. In gratitude, the captain built cottages and leased them to Young and other gypsies. In addition, they and their descendants were given the right to cut turf and peat and graze cattle and horses on Yetholm Common.²

The story is traditional, and another version suggests that the gypsies were granted hospitality in 1745 after they rescued a horse that was owned by Sir William Bennet and stolen by Jacobites. Although the stories are disputed, there is no doubt that the travelers settled in the area and were granted common rights. Commoning in all its diversity includes collective ownership of land and other resources as well as the right of certain individuals to enjoy the property of others. The commons is a topic of increasing interest, and numerous studies link commons to environmental sustainability. The term has varied connotations—some negative (in terms of notions of the tragedy of the commons and associated mismanagement) and some positive or even poetic (as a mythic landscape, a political metaphor, a utopian community).³

Overview

This book argues that property rights are essential to understanding sustainability. Property rights over land and other resources help condition how we interact with our wider environment. This book looks at a particular form of property ownership—the commons. Chapter 1 outlines different definitions of the commons, describes the tragedy of the commons, and discusses how different forms of common-pool property influence the environment. The environmental implications of commons within a historical context are illustrated with case studies from England, India, and Mongolia. Chapter 2 looks at the extent to which commons, where apparently sustainable, are maintained by cultural norms and not purely selfish economic considerations. Chapter 3 argues that the history of the commons is political. Rather than failing, many commons have been destroyed by invasion or eroded by the introduction of market economies. Their destruction has often led to environmental degradation. But commons are not (as some seem to suggest) a utopian alternative to systems based on private property. Their creation and maintenance has often involved conflict between individuals, social classes, communities, and even species. Chapter 4 discusses the kinds of questions we need to ask if we are to be good ancestors so that our activities do not threaten the future of our children and their children. The extent to which commons can be used to create a more sustainable future is the central theme of this chapter.

Commons, Sustainability, and Environmental History

Environmental history may help us make better decisions about how to move toward a more sustainable future. Today human society appears to be struggling to deal with sustainability, if sustainability is defined as the ability of present society to exist without damaging future generations. Climate change is already causing temperatures to rise, species are becoming extinct at an increasing rate, and other environmental problems seem set to multiply. Can history help us sustain history so that human beings can prosper without eroding the basic life-support systems for our species on this planet? Historical examples should not be used to advocate a return to some supposedly ideal state of nature. Rather than looking for a previous golden green age, the literary theorist Tim Morton has argued that we should be nostalgic for the future, helping people figure out that the ecological ‘paradise’ has not occurred yet.⁴ Although the creation of paradise may be a little ambitious, this short book suggests that the study of common-pool property rights can help us to develop a more sustainable future. Commons fit with Morton’s notion of nostalgia for the future. They sometimes are seen as archaic institutions that can be traced to prehistoric times, but they can also be understood to include free software and cyberspace.

The link between environmental sustainability and commons has been discussed since at