Gonner, Edward Carter Kersey (1862–1922)

Abstract

The character, causes and consequences of that long historical process which witnessed the transformation of British agriculture from a system of open field cultivation based on entitlements and obligations fixed by the custom of the manor, to a system of large-scale enclosed farming characterized by modern relations between wage-labour and capital with the ownership of the land vested in private hands, constitutes perhaps the most difficult, controversial and fascinating set of historical questions facing the economist. From the time of the agrarian disturbances of the sixteenth century, popular opinion has associated the process with physical deprivation among the agricultural population, the depopulation of the countryside and, later, with the throwing of whole populations into urban centres where they were forced to subsist under conditions of severe economic hardship. While scholarly opinion on the subject has not proved to be so single-minded, there are a few contributions to it that seem likely to have a long life; Gonner’s Common Land and Inclosure (1912a) is one of them.