5 Enclosures and the Making of Modern Britain

• This chapter asks why the English enclosure movement has been considered in isolation from colonial enclosures (the British conquest and appropriation of overseas territories). • It offers a brief history of land enclosures in England and outlines the standard social-scientific account of their role in the making of modern Britain. • It troubles this standard account by examining the entangled relationship between domestic and colonial enclosures. • It considers how resituating domestic enclosures in the context of colonial enclosures enriches our understandings of the making of modern Britain. • It asks how this more expansive account of enclosures might deepen social- scientific understandings of ongoing forms of global capitalist enclosure in the contemporary world.