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This concluding chapter provides a summation of the main findings of the book as a whole. Parks were much more important to the concerns of the aristocracy than has usually been suggested, and they had a strong, and often negative, effect on many rural communities and some urban ones. The central place of hunting in the creation of parks is emphasized, along with the significance of organized hunting as an expression of power and authority. It is also suggested that an interest in leisure, as expressed through the reservation of land for hunting, had an impact on the extent to which lords organized their estates in a commercial or market-focused way. The negotiations and confrontations that surrounded parks are shown to have been an important part of the early history of enclosure, a process that involved the shaping of social norms as well as of agrarian practices.

The Council of Trent's mandate to women's religious lives consisted of an insistence on the rules of enclosure. The Second Vatican Council mandated religious worship to examine every aspect of women's lives in order to discard outmoded customs and practices in light of the needs of their times. This chapter explores the complexities and results of these two movements for renewal, focusing on the situations prior to the councils, the conciliar mandates, their implementation, and their short- and long-term effects.

The changes in typical usage of the various key categories discussed in previous chapters become more pronounced in certain contexts after the late seventeenth century, and the connection with colonies, plantations, and the increasing need for new forms of classification tends to relativize Religion as Christian Truth. This should not be exaggerated. In England the dominance of the church state continues, and the social order is still characterized more in terms of a hierarchy of rank and degree than in terms of Dissenting Individuals motivated by the need for justification and economic salvation. Even Locke's contemporary John Bunyan, whose pilgrimage is an interior moral one, and whose use of the term religious does not refer at all to monastic orders but to a special kind of inner life, still has no concept of a world which is neutral to religion. However, by the early nineteenth century in England there is a clearly gathering momentum to the discourse on “politics” as essentially separate from “religion,” even though the boundaries are hotly disputed and thus by no means yet inscribed into the order of things.

The Renaissance provided some stimulus to European agriculture but a far more profound phenomenon after 1550 CE was a ‘neonaissance’ involving the creation and publishing de novo of reliable knowledge based on systematic observation. This was paralleled by the emergence of an entrepreneurial culture, especially in the maritime nations of England and the Netherlands, that encouraged exploration and agrarian innovation for private profit. In England, land enclosure began as a way to establish farming as a profitable business venture rather than as a socially based subsistence activity. Practical scientific breeding began to emerge in the 17th century with a newly united Britain and the independent Netherlands as major centres. This process was assisted by improved literacy and the establishment of agricultural and scientific societies, such as the Royal Society in London.

The editor of Cicero's correspondence did not publish all the letter files that Cicero left when he died. Many letters were omitted that did not concern politics or involve members of the political class. Among those selected, the preference shown for enclosures, recommendations, and letters addressed to Cicero had the effect of highlighting his influence at every level of Roman society. The editor also made a point of creating arrangements of the letters that emphasized Cicero's role in dramatic events. The published correspondence thus served to project an image of Cicero as an important public man.

This chapter shows how sheep were kept and wool produced in a thinly populated countryside, with some flocks kept on specialized pastures, including the sites of abandoned villages, while others grazed on the fallows and stubbles of the corn-producing open fields of still surviving villages. Heritage himself kept sheep on both types of pasture. Pastures were organized in different ways, and the process of enclosure is discussed. The names in the account book allow the producers to be identified, and they reflect the whole social structure, from gentry to the shepherd who were allowed to keep a few sheep with their employers’ flock. Among the larger producers were the farmers and graziers who leased large pastures, or kept sheep on demesnes which practised mixed husbandry. A high proportion of the wool came from modestly-sized peasant flocks.

This chapter presents an alternative interpretation of the open fields based on historical research in the last thirty years. Open fields were an efficient institution for meeting the needs of small-scale, grain growing farmers. However, market capitalism undermined the open field community from within, which precipitated its demise.

This chapter introduces the nature and significance of medieval parks and explains how they have been studied by previous scholars. It then sets out the many aspects of the subject which remain uncertain or controversial and makes clear the wider importance of the topic in terms of the history of medieval culture, jurisdiction, society, and economy. Two key questions are posed which the rest of the book will attempt to answer. Firstly, what was the purpose of parks? Were these royal and aristocratic reserves mainly important as hunting grounds, economic assets, ‘designed landscapes’, or status symbols? Secondly, what impact did these numerous private enclosures have on wider society? Did park creation pose more of challenge to the king and other lords, who had their own strong interest in game and hunting, or to peasants and townsmen, who wanted access to woods, pastures, roads, and fields?

This chapter uses landscape and documentary evidence to uncover for the first time how park-making affected wider communities, including townsmen as well as peasants. The analysis takes in the whole of the middle ages, providing separate discussion of the earlier and later parts of the period, with their very different demographic and economic conditions and social climate. It is shown that park-making frequently led to the confiscation of farmland from peasants — often with little or no compensation — as well as ensuring that woods and wastes were excluded from assarting and arable expansion. At the same time, parks reduced access to the vital resources of woods and common pastures and led to the blocking and re-routing of roads and tracks. Parks are thus shown to have been an important element in medieval enclosure and an area where the priorities of lords and tenants were often strongly opposed.

Chapter 3 focuses on the pre-modern European oral peasantry and their gift economy and rituals on the commons. The chapter argues that the eradication of this world is in great part due to the enclosure movement and the rise of the market economy. The transition from the gift (or moral) economy to the market economy is said to play a central role in the de-spiriting of the non-human world. The work of Elizabeth Potter on the debate between Robert Boyle and the hylozoist Franciscus Linus, and the defeat of hylozoism, a non-dualistic, non-mechanistic worldview, is presented. Using other historical works, it is argued that hylozoism was the worldview of those who lost out in the struggles of the times, namely the peasantry, the working classes, the heretics, and the “witches.” The new order required a new worldview, the dualist mechanistic one we have inherited.

Chapter 3 analyzes the Mexican economy's structural transformation and fast expansion during the Porfiriato. It argues that the achievement of political stability—through the establishment of a strong state—plus a change in development strategy and institutional modernization permitted the removal of key constraints on Mexico's economic growth starting in the 1870s. This economic and political change transformed the economy in many ways: the railway system modernized the nation's infrastructure and integrated the domestic market. Primary exports boomed and a modern manufacturing sector emerged. It shows that, however, the distribution of economic benefits was highly uneven, in particular market concentration in industry, banking, and most conspicuously land resulting from what amounted to an enclosure movement in which federal and peasant communal lands were redistributed to land development companies and rich individuals. The chapter concludes by stating that the process of increasing inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth proved to be the Achilles' heel of the regime.