p. 36 In the REformation, maths was God, and those who held the numbers held the land. Land owernship itself became a profession and supported a raft of other jobs – lawyers, surveyors, estate agents – each generating reams of paperwork to prove their own viability .. The fence lines that were rolled out across England were the manifestation of lines of legal prose, and each justified the other. .. what lay inside them was partitioned from the web of social ties and responsibilities to the communities that surrounded them and became abstracted into commodity alone – something to be bought and sold on the market. There was pushback both in governemnt and Church. In 1601, Edward Glascock rebuked Robery Johhnson, MP for Monmouth and a professional survetor, saying ‘I think the gentleman that last spake hath better Skill in Measuring of Land than Men’s Consciences.” The necessary displacement of people from within the fences, and their subsequent estrranement from the wealth of the land, was decried as an immoral act.”

p. 52 “The original meaning of the word acre was ‘open country, untenanted land’, but by Gainsborough’s time it had come to refer to an exact measurement of land, standardised across the country to facilitate valuations and sales… In feudal times, property meant rights in a piece of land, referring to the customs of permissibile actions and their reciprocal duties. Medieval lawyers never spoke of owning land, but, rather, of holding the land … yours to use, according to local custom, and to the ecology of what each particular site had to offer.”

p. 112 “In 1607 in what came to be known as the Midland Revolt, there were 11 uprisings, each with thousands of people, protesting the severe enclouse of the Midlands… Their communcal cornfields had been hedged and stripped to provide pasture for the sheep. The rent on their properties had spiked and their common rights, collecting wood for winter, allowing their pids and cows to fatten on the pasture had been removed. With nowhere else to go, many were now squatting on the side of the fields they had lived on a decdade earlier. In an enquiry in the August following the revolt, royal commissioners had investigated the scale of illegal enclosure and depopulation in Rockingham Forest alone: 27,000 acres had been enclosed, 350 farms descryed and almost 150,000 people across 18 villages gad lost their homes.”

p. 117 “a line written over a miillennium ago by a poet soldier, keeping watch at an outpost on China’s Great Wall: The long wall is propped up on yellow sands and whitened bones/We have inscribed our achievements on the mountains of Mongolia,/But the land lies deserted, the moon shines for no one.”

p. 137 “Across England the wealth of the sugar plantations was being injected into English society, into buildings and infrastructure… until only recently the exact nature of this wealth and its effect on British landscape and society was locked away in the National Archives. But in 2009 a team of processors from UCL, led by Dr Catherine Hall, began a vast project mnapping the Legacies of Britain’s Slave Ownership … p. 140 when slavery was finally abolished in 1833, the slavers received a total of £20 million from the British taxpayer, estimated as anything bvetween £87 billion and £500 billion in today’s money. The slaves, of course, received nothing, and as part of the deal had to stay exactly where they were and work unpaid ‘apprenticeships’ for four years after their supposed release.”

p. 146 “When the East India established their first outpost in Calcutta, India’s share of the world economy was 27%… It was famed for its textiles, its architecture, its shipbuilding, its spices… In 1930, historian Will Durrant published The Case for India, in which he decribes the Company’s methods as a ‘conscious and deliberate bleeding of India;. England was teh tick on the udder of the world’s cash cow, sucking up all it could get, inflating itself in direct proportion to what it took. .. The railways that Briatin ‘gave’ India were not the standard history book definition of gifted infrastructure,. but in fact intravenous tubes lodged deep inside the body,k transfusing the blood as efficiently as possible fromn the heart of India to England.”

p. 151 When the British left India they had drained its GDP from 27% to 3%. It is estimated that up to 29 million Indians died of famine, murder and organised genocide under the colonial regime.”

p. 187 At Grow Heathrow and reflecting on Greenham “Foucault had a word for spaces such as these. He called them heterotopias – spaces of outsiders forged deep inside society, spaces that reflect the orthodoxy of that society by arranging themselves differently. These spaces are distinct from utopias in that they are real, they actually exist, and they manifest their ideologies in real space. Someone has done the plumbing, set up the solar panels, dug the long-drop toilet. They work; there are alternatives. This is a message that the Fathers find profoundly threatening.”

p. 193 In 1985, the then secretary of state Michael Heseltine introduced new by-laws for Greenham Commmon that upgraded the trespass into the camp to a criminal charge… Hansard recorded a total of 812 trespasses in the first 15 months from January 1987, each breack calculated to expose the flaws not just in the fence , but the legal systemns that supported it. And it worked. After a four-year legal battle, the courts ruled that Heseltine had pushed aside a legal constraint in his quest to end the protest – he had acted ultra vires, beyond his powers, or more literally, beyond his manhood. In 1992 the courts ruled that the fence itself had not been erected under ministerial consent and Judge Lait ruled “the perimeter fence at RAF Greenham Common was unlawful at all relevant times.” The fence was the crime, not the crossing of it.”

p. 204 “when William invaded England, the 4,000 or so thegns were wiped from power and replaced by 180 of William’s closest mercenary allies, the barons. A new hierarchy of French nouncs was imposed: the barons, then the cisounts, the marquises and the dukes. The only remaining Germanic title was earl, which was kept to divert the crass minds of the English … “It is a likely speculation that the Norman French title ‘count’ was abandoned in England in favour of the Germanic earl … precisley because of the uncomfortable phonetic proximity to cunt.”

p. 211 “at the start of the 18th century, fuelled by the civil unrest of commoners across Hampshire and Berkshire, the silence of poaching transformed into a brash, violent protest for equal rights. In broad daylight, hordes of men and women would corss the fences, on horseback or on foot, and devastate the deer stock of local manor parks, taking some home, but leaving, like foxes in the henhouse, most of the carcasses strewn in blood on the plains … because many smudged their faces with charcoal, they were known as ‘the Blacks’. .. The Black Act of 1723 introduced 50 new capital offences across the land… the Black were labelled a national emergency… They were described as Jacobites, terrorists cells seeking to topple the king. The Act was suppposed to be a temporary measure, but lasted for another century.”

p. 213 “I am reminded of philosopher Edmund Burke’s definition of the aristocracy. “To be bred in a place of estimation; to see bothing low and sordid from one’s infancy … to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the widespread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be ebaled to draw on the attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found … these are the circumstances of men that form what I call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation”.

p. 218 “Today, a third of Britain is still owned by the aristocracy. The 24 remaining non-royal dukes own almost 4 million acres between them. There are 191 earls, 115 viscounts and 435 barons, and most are still significant landowners. In 2016 the 14 marquises recived just over £3.5 million worth of farm subsidies for the 100,000 acres while 17 of the dukes who receibved farm subsidies got £8.4 million etween them.”

p. 265 “The Hobhouse report of 1947 proposed a fundamental change to the access laws of the countryside – it envisaged a full right to roam over all uncultivated land in England, so that people could actually experience the land for which they had fought. It was proposed as a corollary to the NHS, providing health and recreation, the prevention of illness before the need for a cure. But landowners… lobbied hard against this proposal, and so when the Bill was trnasitioned into law, a full right to roam was demmed a step too far. The compromise that followed was called the National Parks Act, and though it was still hailed as a people’s charter it was in fact a major success for the landowning establishment.”

p. 278 “In 1989 the philosopher Edward Soja publiched the first in a series of books and essays that advanced the concept of Henri Lefebvre’s Third Space.. a conversation between ideology and architecture open to all who inhabit it. It is both imagined and real, both abstract and concrete, and builds a space where the borders of society can be constantly challenged… groups who are marginalised by the ideologies imposed by place can interact on an equal footing with the centres of power that created them… an area of “radical openness, a context from which to build communities of resistance and renewal that cross the boundaries and double-cross the binaries of race, genmder, class and all oppressively Othering categories”. … not imposed from above, but created from within. Its central concept is its lipperiness, its opennes to change, the permeability of its borders of definition. It is in constant flux, an ‘open-ended set of defining moments’.It is a theme picked up by bell hooks in her book Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural politics, where she talks of ‘heterotopic marginality’ as a place, and mindset, of resistance against unequal power distribution.”

p. 298 “Free festivals, organic gatherings of people on common land, have always been a threat to the status quo. But organised, sanctioned festivals, the bread and circuses of ancient Rome, were seen as a way of allowing people to vent their frustrations in a manner contained by local authorities. An article from the London Magazine in 1738 sums up this paternalism neatly: “Dancing on the Green at Wakes and merry Tides should not only be indulg’d but incourag’d: and little Prizes being alloted for the Maids who excel in a Jig or a Hornpip would make them return to their daily Labour with a light Heart and a grateful Obedience to their Superiors’.”

p. 299 “the final nail in the coffin for freedom in the ocuntryside was the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994. Like the Tudor and Georgian Vagrancty Acts, it targeted specific types of people, grouped them together and defined them as a threat to the state. It outlawed alternative lifestyles and ideologies, by removing people’s rights to express them in real space… Its trigger was trhe largest rave in English history, on Castlemorton Common, but it sroots stretched back into the early 1980s, to Margaret Thatcher’s attempts to obliterate what she called the ‘permissive society’ to a long-established battleground in the fight for space: Stonehenge.”

p. 307 “river and their banks are subject to a category of legislation called Riparian Rights. While the Crown is said to own the water that flows through a river, the landowner holds the rights to the riverbank which extends across its bed towards an imaginary line drawn halfway through the river. To kayak or swijm along a stretch of river, you much have permission from each and every one of the porperty owners on the banks, meaning the long stretch of open water is actually (or rather legally) divided up into an invisible grid of lines, each under the control of the lord of trhat section of land.”

p. 320 In France, you can walk into any town hall and request to see the maps of ownership for that part of the country. In the US, Montana’s land registry is online for all to access. New Zealand opened up its land registry in 2015, and now has a minister for Land Information… the resistance to opening up the Land Registry continues to this day, because when you put up a fence around land it becomes your business and yours alone.”

p. 372 “When Cotland introduced its first Land Reform Act in 2003, it also introduced the right of a commujnity to buy land as a cooperative. Now, almost 20 years later, nearly 500 community bodies own more than 500,000 acres in common.”

P. 20 The growing territoriality of slavery within the United States gave new meaning to the possibility of slaveholder real estate accumulation. In the early United States, the largest landmass expansion occurred through the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the sixe of the United States by incorporating 828,000 square miles… made possible by European finance. Bonds totallyin $15 million to finance the Louisiana Purchase were issued to the United States by the British merchant bank Barings Bank and the Amsterdam Hope and Company. Thomas Jefferson, president during the acquisition, wrote that the Louisiana Puchase would enable ‘the future spread of our descendants’ with a population that would double or triple the size of the United States. He envisioned the future US as a white racial ethno-state and was committed to Black removal and replacement… For him, Louisiana offered a place to experiment with his vision of Black territorial diffusion – to move enslaved people across the United State to decrease Black population density and therefore the possibility of Black revolution against slaveholders, something he was fearful of in the midst of the Haitian Revolution.”

p. 21 The expansion of US slavery itself was driven in part by the British industrial demand for commodities produced through slavery… By 1841, slavery-produced cotton accounted for 10% of British manufacturing.”

p. 26 Karl Marx thought of immigrating to Texas in 1846, believing that settler access to land pressed “inevitably on to communism”. He also saw the 1846 passage of tariff reduction policies between Britain and the US as momentous, serving as the ‘guiding star’ that heralded the arrival of the millennium. For Marx, these laws heightened the contraditions within capitalism… the repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain, the US proslavery Walker Tariff, which reduced cotton taxes, and trhe equalization of sugar duties through the British Sugar Duties Act.”

p. 31 Gesturing towards decreased imports between 1844 and 1846, characterized by low sugar yields, the Liverpool sugar refiners Macfie and Sons wrote to Prime Minister Peel that it was “perfectly evident that erelong the refineries will be forced to reduce their workings for want of raw material, unless new sources of supply are opened up”. Here “new sources of supply” served as a euphemism for ex[anded access to sugar produced through slavery in Cuba and Brazil.”

p. 32 “The free trade fundamentalism of Cobden and Hume would prioritise free trade in relation to the demands of slaveholders. Their free trade fundamentalism had a twofold anti-Black character: anti-Black once in perpetuation of slavery and anti-Black again in the ascription of failure to Black freedom in the British Caribeean when freedpeople did not produce sugar in quantities equal to enslaved people in Cuba and Brazil. “

“Emancipation across the British Empire enabled the deepening and extension of colonial capitalist power. In Cape Town, compensation for indebted slaveholders was travsferred to merchants who put these funds into the wool economy. These transformation were simultaneous within an increasingly integrated global economy dominated by the British Empire as linked to US settler slavery.”

p. 35 “While textiles manufactured from cotton produced by enslaved people in the US were exported to Calcutta, along with other Indian cities, to be sold throughout colonial India, raw materials produced in colonial India and imported to the United States included jute and indigo… Jute gunny sacks… were used in the southern plntations economy primarily as cotton bagging but also in some instances as provisions for enslaved people as blankets and clothing.”

p. 52 “Yet until Black emancipation in the United States, Carolina rice dominated England’s market. In general, it met the highest demand, sold in the highest volumes, and commanded the highest prices ,, not the principal staple of English households… In an 1863 survey of working-class households, the surveryor noted that rice was most commonly consumed in winter ‘to supply the place of vegetables’ and that small quanitities were consumed in 58% of cases.”

p. 57 Caroline rice production rested not only upon the labor of enslaved people but also on the knowledge of enslaved cultivators … Black knowledhe and skill about rice cultivation emerged through the African diaspora and pathways that tied the rice-rpoducing South Caroline and Georgia Low Country practices to West African rive production in Upper Guinea… rive planters were often absent, leaving their plntations for up to six-month periods beginning in spring or early summer out of fear of disease and retuning in November after rice harvesting.”

p. 58 “By 1823, the first shipment of rough rice (known as unmilled or paddy rice) was exported from the US to Britain. … By 1850, that transformation was nearly complete, as most rice exported from the the US was paddy rice… One South Carolina rice plabnter noted that continued dependency on slave labor for rice millling would have made it impossible to produce and “prepare for market anything like the number of barrels now produced”.

p. 78 Finnie attempted to introduce the ‘American system’ of cotton cultivation in the North-West Provinces along the Yamuna River, first in Kotra Makrandpur and later in Afra… refettled in southeastern India, where he struggled to grow cotton in Tiruneveli from 1845 until he ultimately left India in 1849 … “The only difference between a Collie and a Negro is this:: the first we can make work out of our sight y operating on his fears, but the latter we must persuade and drive together which answers very well as long as we are present, but has no effect as soon as our acks are turned… a reminder that in some form, psycholpogical terror has always accompanied the whip.”

p. 87 “Visions of slave revolts destroying capitalism and bringing on famine in England reflected deep anxieties about textile mills’ dependence upon US slavery. These ansieties were bound to the perception that the British Empire was incapable of an equivalent system for cotton cultivation. The image of the factory as the apex of social, civilisational and racial development gave way to anxiety over the fragile foundations and convulsive dynamics upon which the factory rested.”

p.89 “By 1859, India formed one third of the total export market for cotton goods and over one quarter of the cotton yarns export market. Within India, the North West Provinces were regarded as trhe most significant outlet for Manchester foods. A circuit of global capital began with the US slave plantations, continued to Lancashire textile factories, and concluded in the North_Western Procinved. The circuit depended simultaneously upon the differential exploitation of Black labor and factor workers and upon what Irfan Habib has called the “colonization of the Indian economy”.

p.95 “individual manufacturing interests in England regarded investment in cotton cultivation outside of the American South as the truly suicidal option. Dependence upon the sale of Manchester foods to India and competition with Indian weaves caused Manchester’s capitalists to exp[ress concern over the competitive advantage India’s handloom industry would gain if cotton were widely cultivated in India, given high carriage costs… what would prevent consumers… from simply purchasing Indian manufacture instead”.

p. 103 “what better proof can you have than that when in the year 1861, when British India exported to the UK alone, at a distance of thousands of miles, more than 3,000,000 cwt of rice … the North West Provinces lost a quarter of a million of lives and immense property by famine…. the economy thrived through the ideological pursuit of free markets that ran through rather than against death from starvation and enslavement.”

p. 133 “This hatred of Surat cotton became tangled with perceptions of the dishonesty of colonial Indian peasant cotton growers and a belieg in their failure to meet the obligations that they as colonial subjects must bear in suporting metropolitan Britain.”

p. 147 Amid the textile industry crisis, white setllers and settling interests examined Queensland and charter a course far removed from that of India’s Nothr-Western Provinces, positing the expanded colonization of Queensland as a solution to capitalist crisis. Many white settlers looked especially towards expanded white settlement through the movement of unemployed English textile workers to the colony. Economic disruptions could be navigated through a reordering of colonial and racial relations and the systematic importation of labor – especially white labour – from England, Scotland and the US to Queensland… Settlers opposed the immigration of Chinese and South Asian labor not on economic but on racial grounds. Factory owners … preferring insyead to constrain and restrict the movemebt of unemployed laborers in order to keep factory wages low… Queensland imagined to be like Louisiana in its capacity to cultivate sugar and rice… Queensland… a site of extreme violence in the constitution of global capitalism… In 1859, Queensland comprised roughly 30,000 settlers and possibly more than 100,000 Aboriginal people… Settlement predicated on a belief that Aboriginal people would not do the work of empire but would instead be dispossessed, a belieg that was informed by white settler interprestations of Aboriginal death in NSW and Tasmania and by knowledge about demographic death in the Americas… Queensland settlers unleashed unmediated colonial violence uncontrolled by Sydney or London.”

p. 155 “WHile Queensland’s planmtations would eventually employ Chinese labor displaced from the gold fields of NSW and Victoria, the basis of the early Queensland plantation system would become rooted in South Sea Island labor, laborers who would at times be described as “South Sea Island coolies” as a way to understand the position of such laborers within an emerging plntation regume.. Such racist descriptions were part of logic defined by the hierarchical organisation of the settler colonial economic order for white planter advancement. Yet the advocacy for the expansion of the plantation system would also be challenged by another white settler interest concerned with making Queensland into acolony that would better white European lives through the transformation of Queensland into a white man’s and white-only settler colony.”

p. 219 What Du Bois characterized as the ‘upheaval of humanity’ that characterized emancipation and Reconstruction … Central to this struggle were freedpeople’s efforts to provide for themselves and their families rather than work for masters, especially in anything that approached the conditions of slavery, and movement to cities was central to this struggle. African American refusal to labor within a plantation system characteriwsed by gang labor ultimately informed the emergence of sharecropping.”