Skip to Content

Peter Barnes: A Brief History of How We Lost the Commons

March 11, 2013

And what we must do to get it back.
Image from Flickr via caribb

By Peter Barnes
By arrangement with On the Commons

In the beginning, the commons was everywhere. Humans roamed through it, hunting and gathering to meet their needs. Like other species, we had territories but these were communal to the tribe, not private to the person.

Agriculture arose about ten thousand years ago and along with it came permanent settlements and private property. Rulers granted ownership of land to loyal families. Often, military leaders distributed conquered land to their soldiers.

Despite the growth of private property, much land remained part of the commons. In Roman times, bodies of water, shorelines, wildlife, and air were explicitly classified as res communes, resources available to all. During the Middle Ages, kings and feudal lords often claimed title to rivers, forests, and wild animals, often to have such claims periodically rebuked. The Magna Carta, which King John of England was forced to sign in 1215, established forests and fisheries as res communes.



One observer of this transformation was Thomas Paine, the pamphleteer who spoke so eloquently for American independence. Seeing how enclosure of the commons benefited a few and disinherited many others, Paine proposed a remedy—not a reversal of enclosure, which he considered necessary for economic progress, but compensation for its loss.




A century and a half later, the U.S. created a national fund to do part of what Paine recommended—we call it Social Security. We’ve yet to adopt the other part, but its basic principle—that enclosure of a commons requires compensation—is as sound in our time as it was in Paine’s.

The Fate of the Commons in America

In the years since European settlement, America developed its own relationship with the commons, which in our case included the vast lands we took from native people and Mexico. Some Americans, exemplified by Thomas Jefferson, saw our commons as the soil from which we could build a nation of prosperous small farmers and proprietors. This philosophy led to passage of laws such as the Land Ordinance of 1785, the Homestead Act, the Morrill Land Grant College Act, and the Reclamation Act, which allocated family size plots to settlers and financed schools to educate them. Many Americans, exemplified by Teddy Roosevelt, also cherished these lands for their wildness and beauty, which led to the establishment of national parks, wildlife preserves and wilderness areas.

At the same time, others in America viewed our common wealth as the means to their personal fortune, and lobbied or bribed government officials to give away priceless lands to railroads, mining and timber interests, and speculators.




What’s astonishing about these takings isn’t that they occur, but how unaware of them the average citizen is. As another Republican, former Secretary of the Interior and Alaska governor Walter Hickel said, “If you steal $10 from a man’s wallet, you’re likely to get into a fight, but if you steal billions from the commons, co-owned by him and his descendants, he may not even notice.”

Enclosure, in which property rights are literally taken or given away by government, is half the reason our commons is in such a steep decline today; the other half is a form of trespass called externalizing—that is, corporations shifting their costs onto the commons. Externalizing is as damaging as enclosure, yet much less noticed, since it occurs quietly and continuously, as in the case of pollution seeping into a river.

The one-two punch of enclosure and externalizing is especially destructive. With one hand, corporations take valuable stuff from the commons and privatize it. With the other hand, they dump bad stuff into the commons and pay nothing. The result is profits for corporations but a steady loss for everyone else, to whom the commons belong.

Capitalism Enters the Fray



In the 21st century, however, this is no longer the case. As economist Joshua Farley has noted, “If we want more fish on our dinner plates, the scarce factor isn’t fishing boats, it’s fish. If we want more timber, the scarce factor isn’t sawmills, it’s trees.”

The world today is awash with capital, most of it devoted to speculation. By contrast, healthy ecosystems are increasingly scarce. If anything deserves priority today, it’s nature’s capital, yet capitalism rolls on driven by the profit-maximizing demands of financial capital.

As a businessman and investor, I believe we can evolve to a new stage of capitalism, envisioned centuries ago by Locke and Paine, where corporations and the commons work in balance. But we have no time to waste.

Excerpted from Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (Berrett-Koehler).

Peter Barnes, an entrepreneur who co-founded Working Assets, is co-founder of On the Commons.

Readers like you make Guernica possible. Please show your support.

Tagged with:

You might also like

One comment for Peter Barnes: A Brief History of How We Lost the Commons

  1. Comment by Jim Olson on August 25, 2013 at 2:19 pm

    Thank you for publishing Peter Barnes excellent overview of the demise of the commons, which also gives clues on how to regain it or at least a balance.

    But a couple of reminders. First, the commons in water, from Roman times through Magna Carta, and the common law, has never been enclosed. Sure rights of user have been wrecklessly expanded in some jurisdictions, e.g. Texas, to near ownership, but under common law, water in England and Canada remains in the Crown as sovereign, and here in the U.S. water, to extent in can even be owned at all, is held by the sovereign. Second, navigable waters and the pubic’s right to use them, are protected from control and harmful threats that would interfere with the pubic’s right to use, for boating, fishing, navigation, recreation, and qualitiy of life, under this public right, known as the “public trust” in the U.S. and states. Third, if enclosure goes to far, or harms go too far, the public trust and commons have been violated; there is an umbrella principle beyond which private claims can go even if approved by the legislature, because the commons in water remains. Hence, tied to water, there are some things that cannot be done on land if it subordinates or harm the common or public trust. Government has a duty to protect thie commons, and citizens in some instances should be able to enforce it.

Leave a comment

Anti-Spam Quiz:

Subscribe without commenting