| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.4

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Management of Common Land in North West Europe, c. 1500–1850. Edited by Martina de Moor, Leigh Shaw-Taylor, and Paul Warde. Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area (CORN) publication series. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2002. 261 p. Figures, tables, glossary. Paperback $75.00.

Until the publication of this book, for me the two classic studies on the history of common management of land were Janet M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990). The two books have major differences in approach. Neeson's is a good example of social history based on extensive archive research. Ostrom's appeared in a series on political economy: The approach is theoretical but it uses a number of real historical case-studies. In spite of the methodological contrasts, both authors start from the presumption that commons can work. The common management of land is not per definition some old-fashioned, non-efficient way of organizing agriculture, that was prone to fail so that dissolution had to follow up sooner or later (hence the enclosures in England). Neeson shows how functional commons were and that they came in various kinds. The products of the common wastelands were essential for the cottagers without land. Common grazing grounds were not necessarily infertile and overgrazed. The quality of management determined the quality of the output of the common, and some were managed quite well. Ostrom gives a number of cases where common management was very successful for a very long period and under very different cultural constraints, ranging from pasturing in the Swiss Alps to cultivating rice in the Japanese mountains.

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