Enclosures, colonization, and the English novel: Inhabiting land in the British Empire

This dissertation explores the relationship of British Parliamentary Acts of Enclosure to transcultural forces of colonialism and neo-colonialism in English and Anglophone novels and cultures. The central claims of the dissertation are as follows: that the land-enclosure movement was symptomatic of a larger ontological shift in how people related to the land and to each other; that England had to colonize its own land and people (in the form of enclosure acts) before it could begin to acquire land abroad; that this colonization of land paved the way for the judicial creation of the universal, sovereign individual by erasing the pre-colonial, agricultural laborer referred to legally as an "inhabitant"; that the mapping, land registration, and extensive documentation involved in the actual act of enclosure founded the first substantial architecture of a nation-wide bureaucracy, covering England in a sheet of official language that became instrumental in the subsequent constitution of an imperial administration; and that this transformation of the land into commodity capital enabled the imperial polis to transmit its power more concretely to its peripheral territories. I argue, therefore, that the enclosure movement is integrally related to the rise of British imperialism, and to the formation of England as a nation---and that an ideology of enclosure continues to this day to inform the West's relation to its former colonies that now make up the nations of the Third World. Finally, thematizing the critical work of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Michel Foucault, and Martin Heidegger, I develop the potential of an "extra-ideological" force that I see at work in literature, and in cultural relations to the land. This extra-ideological force is found in varying indigenous territorialities that stand in opposition to the larger forces of enclosure and globalization, offering the potential for a non-foundational politics of communal resistance.