More's indictment of this unpeopling of the countryside resonates powerfully today, at the end of what Eric Hobsbawm calls 'the most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half' of the twentieth century: the death of the global peasantry.
(4) As Lee's statement makes clear, we live in a new age of globe-girdling enclosures, one in which the unpeopling of the English countryside described by Thomas More has been magnified dramatically, as part of a process which, as will become clear, no longer affects family farmers alone.
While seeking to legitimate acts of enclosure in both England and her colonies, Locke thus also records a negative image of the suffering and struggles catalysed by this first great unpeopling.
The continuous process of unpeopling that I have been discussing has, until quite lately, been remarkably opaque to critical analysis.
