The Great Enclosure

The most important historical event no one has ever heard of happened on December 14, 1960. It doesn’t even have a name, though the fact that it happened is uncontroversial among historians of government.

I call it the Great Enclosure.

It was the culmination of a process that took several centuries to complete, and it fundamentally changed the relationship between citizens and their state.

In 1750, a cottager in the English Midlands who owned almost nothing could still feed his family without anyone’s permission. His holdings were modest—a one-room house, a few tools, clothes on his back—but he could graze a cow on the common pasture, because he had a right to do so (called the Common of Pasture). He could cut peat from the bog for fuel, gather wood for his fence, turn his pigs into the forest in autumn to eat acorns, and fish the stream that ran through the waste.

He didn’t own any of this land. But he had rights to it — ancient, customary, legally enforceable rights that predated the king on the throne, rights older than Parliament itself. The rights did not depend on the grace of the lords of the manor. Royal courts would issue writs for commoners and against lords when rights were obstructed.

By 1820, every one of those rights was gone.

By 1960, the same thing happened to the entire planet.

In England, the story repeated itself over 4,000 times. A notice was nailed to the church door. Parliament had passed an Enclosure Act for the parish. Commissioners would arrive to survey the land, evaluate claims, and divide what was once the commons into private parcels. The landlords would, of course, retain ownership of the land, subject to certain freehold claims from more established smallfolk. Everyone else with a documented right would receive a proportionate share, which seemed fair at the time. But within a generation, the cottagers who grazed their animals on common land, gathered fuel from the waste, and fished the manor streams were landless laborers with nothing to sell but their bodies and their time.

A word was coined for this class of people: the proletariat.

The existence of the commons and the common rights gave commoners an exit option. This disciplined the powerful because the commoners could reject the terms set by the landlords and live off their own product of the land. As proletarians, there was nowhere else to go.

A related process happened in the American frontier. The Wild West was a continental-scale commons. Americans did not enjoy ancestral legal rights like the Englishmen did, but they were functionally identical: space wasn’t yet fully claimed, and Americans who did not want to live under the government of any particular state could pack up their bags and head out west. The most notable example were the Mormons, who fled persecution in Missouri and found self-determination in what is now Utah.

In 1893, a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the Census Bureau had effectively closed the frontier three years earlier. Since the founding of the Republic, the Census Bureau had tracked the frontier line, the boundary beyond which population density fell below two persons per square mile of settled area. In 1890, Superintendent Robert Porter announced that the unsettled area had been “so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” The frontier was a place where the traditional trappings of government—courts, legislatures, property registries, tax collectors—had not yet been established and so had no power.

Turner’s argument was that the existence of this frontier had been the defining force in American political life—that it explained American democracy, American individualism, and American resistance to authority—because it gave Americans an exit option. The frontier was a social safety valve. When conditions in the Domesticated East became intolerable, people moved to the Wild West. This self-selection process continuously drained off discontent that might have otherwise become revolutionary pressure.

Turner was describing an American phenomenon, but the mechanism was universal. The political scientist Albert Hirschman identified it in its most general form: when people can leave, the institutions they leave exert themselves to be worth staying for. This is the exit option, and he argued it was the most fundamental disciplinary force available to the powerless. Exit is more reliable than voting, more immediate than protest.

The anarchist anthropologist James C. Scott documented the same principle across centuries and continents. Borderland sovereigns throughout history governed with more restraint than their inland counterparts, not out of benevolence, but because their subjects could walk away. In his books The Art of Not Being Governed and Against the Grain, he describes this pattern occurring in the hills of Southeast Asia, across the steppe between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, and in the maroon communities of the Caribbean interior. Again and again, the same pattern emerged. Wherever ungoverned space existed adjacent to governed space, the governed space was better governed.

Scott makes an interesting acknowledgment in his work: he notes that his analysis “largely ceases to be useful” after 1945, when the technologies of distance—railroads, aircraft, telecommunications—made it impossible for populations to outrun the state. The exits were closing, not just in England and America, but everywhere.

Though Scott points to technology, the more consequential change was legal. Like the English and American Enclosures, the Great Enclosure was carried out by legal process, in this case the adoption of the UN Charter in 1945 and the adoption of Resolution 1514 on December 14, 1960.

The UN Charter codified universal sovereignty. For the first time in history, a principle was established as a matter of international law that the world consists entirely of sovereign states with defined borders and, under Article 2, a binding commitment that every state recognize every other state’s territorial claims. There is no category for non-state political entities or ungoverned spaces. No frontier.

This was new. Empires had always claimed vast territories they could not control, but these were unilateral claims. They overlapped, they were contested, and they left enormous spaces that no sovereign claimed (or, that multiple sovereign claimed without any of them being able to enforce the claim). The UN Charter replaced this ancient system with a mutual recognition system. Every member state agreed to respect the territorial integrity of every other member state. The entire surface of the Earth was collectively partitioned, leaving no remainder.

But the UN Charter left one question unresolved: what happens to the territories that aren’t yet states? In 1945, the European powers still had vast colonial holdings in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. These territories were governed by sovereign states, but they were not themselves sovereign. The UN Charter acknowledged their existence but did not resolve their status.

Resolution 1514 resolved it. Adopted unanimously, the Resolution is rightly celebrated for liberating colonial territories and granting them equal status as sovereign members of the United Nations. But Paragraphs 5 and 6 of the relatively short Resolution do something else as means to these liberatory ends, something no one involved seems to have thought of as a separate act, because it seemed so obviously correct. They grant power to these new nations over “all other territories which have not yet attained independence” and codify their “territorial integrity” as inviolable.

Resolution 1514 specified the three, and only three, acceptable outcomes for any non-self-governing territory: emergence as a sovereign state, free association with an existing state, or integration with an existing state.

There was no fourth option. No territory could choose to remain ungoverned. No people could choose to exist outside the state system. The frontier—not as a physical place, but as a legal possibility—was closed by the same resolution that liberated half the world from colonial rule.

This is the Great Enclosure. It was the moment when every square meter of the earth’s land surface came under a recognized sovereign claim, and the international order agreed, unanimously, that this was not merely a fact but a requirement. The formal closure matters independently of whether any particular state can effectively govern its territory. There are places today (in the Sahel, in highland Papua New Guinea, in the deep Amazon, as examples) where state authority is nominal at best. But no one in those places has a recognized right to opt out. In 1750, a person could walk into ungoverned territory and no sovereign had a legal claim to drag them back. After 1960, that option was foreclosed in principle, everywhere, permanently.

Everyone born after 1960 has known no other world. A right that was structurally available and enjoyed by every free person since the creation of the very first state is completely foreign to us. The exit option was the individual’s most potent constraint on sovereign power; if we didn’t like it, we could just leave. Now, there’s no piece of land where exit can be exercised and self-determination realized—except the oceans or Antarctica, exceptions that prove the point. Without a real exit option, states are constrained mostly by competition with one another. Sure, Edward Snowden can flee persecution by the United States, but his only real option is to run into the arms of the Russian state. In less extreme cases, the lack of a frontier means that anyone exiting one state faces legal barriers not only to exit but to enter another state: immigration law, citizenship requirements, double taxation.

In the world before the Great Enclosure, the question was not whether you would be governed well, but whether you would be governed at all. The American founders may have understood this better than anyone. They designed a system that tried to build the discipline of the frontier into the structure of the state itself — competitive jurisdictions through federalism, divided authority through separated branches, enumerated rights that bound the sovereign whether or not its subjects could leave. It was an attempt to engineer internally what the frontier had always imposed from outside: a reason for the powerful to govern with restraint. The Constitution is, in this sense, a machine designed for a world without commons — a world its framers could see coming but had not yet arrived.

Whether the machine is sufficient is an open question. The commons gave the cottager leverage not because he wanted to live on foraged nuts and peat, but because the landlord knew he could. The frontier gave the settler leverage not because the wilderness was comfortable, but because the governor knew it was available. The exit option didn’t have to be exercised to work. It just had to exist.

It no longer exists. For the first time in history, there is no outside. You are always within someone’s borders. What constrains sovereign power now is only what we have built—constitutions, norms, institutions, the competition of states against each other for capital and talent. These are not nothing. But they are all interior mechanisms, all subject to the very power they are meant to restrain. The cottager’s cow didn’t depend on the landlord’s goodwill. The frontier didn’t require the governor’s permission. But we depend on the state to check the state.

We are all, now, enclosed. The Internet was the most promising new frontier and, for now, still is. It is jurisdictionally ambiguous, practically ungoverned, and a space where people can organize, transact, and speak beyond the effective reach of any single sovereign. It disciplines states in much the same way, as we’ve seen with free speech on social media and crypto’s effect on capital. For the past two decades, the Internet has restored something resembling an exit option—if not from physical territory, but from the monopolies on information and regulation that territorial sovereignty implied. But for the past decade states have been fighting to enclose that, too. China built the Great Firewall, Europe has enacted increasingly draconian data and speech regulations, and even the United States has sought to co-opt social media networks as tools of foreign policy. The pattern is the same one that played out in the English parishes and on the American frontier. Ungoverned space appears; people flourish in it; the state arrives and encloses.

The question is whether this enclosure can be resisted and whether digital self-sovereignty, a liberatory idea still in its infancy, can serve the same role as the frontier did before the Great Enclosure—or whether, like every frontier before it, the Internet will be fully enclosed.

Either way, the deeper question remains: whether what we’ve built inside the enclosure is enough.