Abstract
‘Common rights’ and ‘common land’ refer to rights to use land in common in some way. Of several forms of common rights in pre-industrial Europe and elsewhere, only one – free access to land – involved what economists commonly think of as common rights. Common rights in Europe were largely swept away during the 18th and 19th centuries by a process termed ‘enclosure’. Some economic historians have reconsidered the inefficiency of open fields in an English context, but at present the data are too poor to allow a plausible rebuttal of the views of 18th-century critics of the open fields.
Keywords
- Access to land
- Common fields
- Common land
- Common property resources
- Common rights
- Common rights in land
- Common-pool resources
- Enclosure
- Open-access resources
- Tragedy of the commons
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Shaw-Taylor, L. (2018). Common Rights in Land. In: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2461
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95189-5_2461
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