Barbed Wire

A call to transform the way we think about property, this book examines how capitalism has from its origins sought to enclose or privatize the commons, or land and other forms of property that had been viewed as communally owned. A study of corporate globalization and the continuation of empire after the era of political decolonization, it begins with the fencing of the West starting in the 1870s, and moves to examine recent phenomena such as urbanization, mass incarceration, financialization and the treatment of people as commodities in the context of the longue durée of land enclosures, empire, and capitalism.