Following enclosure, crop yields and livestock output increased while at the same time productivity increased enough to create a surplus of labor. The increased labor supply is considered one of the factors facilitating the Industrial Revolution.
An understanding of the Enclosure Acts is necessary to place aspects of the Industrial Revolution in their proper context. The Industrial Revolution is often accused of driving poor laborers en masse out of the countryside and into urban factories, where they competed for a pittance in wages and lived in execrable circumstances.
In turn, the palpable misery of this class fueled the rise of a vigorous socialist movement that blamed the Industrial Revolution for the exploitation of the masses. (The socialists were aware of the impact of enclosure but ultimately blamed industrialization.) And exploitation by industrialists undoubtedly existed; for one thing, some used governmental means. But the masses were there to be exploited largely because powerful land owners had used political means to deny to peasants their traditional rural livelihood. Exploitation was possible because other opportunities had been legally denied.
It would be deceptively simplistic to blame the Enclosure Acts alone for the impoverishment usually ascribed to the Industrial Revolution. Many factors were in play. For example, the majority of people in pre-Industrial England dwelt in the countryside, where they often supplemented their income through cottage industries, especially the weaving of wool. This income evaporated with the advent of cheap cotton and industrialized methods of weaving it. Many influences contributed to the desperation of an unemployed army of workers.
What enclosure does illustrate without question, however, is that the abuses ascribed to the Industrial Revolution are far from straightforward. Blaming industrialization for workers’ misery is not merely simplistic, it is also often incorrect. Whether or not some exploitation would have existed within free-market industrialization, the abuses of the Industrial Revolution were standardized, institutionalized, and carried to excess by government and the use of the political means.
(The tenants displaced by the process often left the countryside to work in the towns. This contributed to the Industrial Revolution – at the very moment new technological advances required large numbers of workers, a concentration of large numbers of people in need of work had emerged; the former country tenants and their descendants became workers in industrial factories within cities.)
