My chapter ‘Enclosures and the Making of Modern Britain’ has just been published in The Modern World After Colonialism: Remaking the Social Sciences (Bristol University Press, 2026), edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Ipek Demir, Paul Robert Gilbert, Su-Ming Khoo and Lucy Mayblin. The book grew out of the Connected Sociologies Curriculum Project and asks what the social sciences look like when they take colonial history seriously.

It has long been argued that the enclosure of common land in England facilitated the agricultural and industrial revolutions that transformed Britain into a modern capitalist state. Yet the enclosure of land and people within England has usually been studied in isolation from the English-led colonial enclosures that were taking place at the same time. The chapter offers a short history of English land enclosure and the standard social-scientific account of its role in the making of modern Britain, and then unsettles that account by tracing the entanglements of domestic and colonial enclosures from the sixteenth century onwards.

In contrast to nation-bound understandings of English capitalist modernity – centred on land enclosure, the Industrial Revolution and the formation of a new class society within England – the chapter understands Britain as an imperial state whose multiracial class society was forged through empire. Reading domestic and colonial enclosures together gives a fuller account of how modern Britain was made, and offers the social sciences better tools for understanding the global capitalist enclosures of the present, from land grabs to the enclosure of water, air and other elemental resources (see related new research project, Elemental Inequalities).

The chapter is a written-up version of the lecture ‘Enclosures and the Making of the Modern World’, which I made for the Connected Sociologies Curriculum Project in 2022, and it feeds directly into my new research project, Elemental Inequalities. Like the rest of the book, it is designed for teaching, with questions and further reading for students.

Read the chapter: Tyler, I. (2026) ‘Enclosures and the Making of Modern Britain’, in G. K. Bhambra, I. Demir, P. R. Gilbert, S.-M. Khoo and L. Mayblin (eds) The Modern World After Colonialism: Remaking the Social Sciences. Bristol: Bristol University Press, pp. 70–84.