The Great Land Theft — Das Kapital

Chapter 27 narrates the expropriation of the English agricultural population as a prolonged process, not a single event. Marx begins with late medieval conditions where many peasants retained customary rights, commons access, and relative independence. He then tracks how wool profits, landlord power, and state transformation drove enclosure and eviction.

Arable land was converted into sheep-walks, villages were depopulated, and common rights were seized. Legal resistance existed, but enforcement failed because property power and class interests overrode formal prohibitions. The Reformation intensified dispossession through church land seizure and transfer to speculators who expelled tenants.

Later parliamentary enclosures regularized theft through statute and compensation regimes that favored large proprietors. Scottish Highland clearances extend the pattern into explicit social engineering where people are removed for sheep and deer forests. The chapter concludes that these cumulative acts supplied capitalist agriculture and produced a landless proletariat for industry.

Scottish clearances and Irish land grabs appear as local policies, but Marx treats them as one system of separating producers from the soil so that labour-power could be bought on capitalist terms.