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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.
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| 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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The Management of Common Land comprises ten studies on commons in Europe (England, Nordic Countries, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands) and thorough introductions and conclusions by the young editors from the universities of Cambridge and Ghent. The comparative exercise is explained well in the introduction, which presents the formalized conditions for successful commons management as derived from historical examples by Ostrom (the so-called design principles, p. 29). Also, the editors have succeeded fairly well in maintaining a consistent use of terminology and concepts throughout the book. |
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The editors state that one should clearly discern the several types of commonly managed lands from the point of view of use and output: common arable (for crop growing), common meadow (for hay making), and common pasture (for permanent grazing, including waste gathering such as wood, gorse, heather and peat) (pp. 18–19). Especially in the historiography on England, confusion exists around the concept of "commons," which has been an obstacle for international comparative analysis. |
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Comparing the case-studies, Ostrom's criteria turn out to be somewhat too abstract to apply to historical situations. In particular, the rule-systems are not always known, as is evident in the tremendous comparative research project of nine French regions presented by Nadine Vivier. However, access to common lands is an important indicator that often can be investigated. The editors propose a classification for the variety of ways by which people came to enjoy rights to commonly managed resources: tenancy or ownership of a particular building, farmstead or landholding, membership of a commune or municipality, part of a cooperative or, rarely, by simply being resident (p. 252). |
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The editors claim that a "new institutionalism" approach is arising. Part of this is explicit attention to historical change that often took the form of increasing exclusion (or the shift of open into closed commons) and the institutional conditions that promoted that. That approach leads to specific attention to the relationships of commons with the state on several levels. Through legal back-up, which could affect access rights, and because of specific interests such as taxation rights, state powers contributed to preservation of commons, as several German cases show. Also, the new approach to commons implies quantitative validation of the economic value of commons, as Warde and Leigh Shaw-Taylor show for Germany and England. |
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This book is not a page-turner. So for courses I shall keep using Neeson's book, since my students, like me, wish to hear the historical actors play and speak. But instead of Ostrom's book, we now have a most interesting comparative study that combines the systematic approach of the social sciences with up-to-date historiographies of commons in a large part of Europe, giving rise to new questions and research perspectives. |
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Petra van Dam is on the Faculty of Arts at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Her research interests include ecological or environmental history, social and economic history, and medieval history. |
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