"According to the working-class politics of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Enclosure Acts (or Inclosure Acts) stole the people’s land, impoverished small farmers, and destroyed the agrarian way of life that had sustained families and villages for centuries. Historians have debated this account of their effects, but for the politicized working classes the Enclosure Acts represented a profound trauma, an extended moment in a narrative of dispossession that undergirded resistance to aristocratic power and urbanization." (Quoted from article)