'One That's More Torrid': The Pirates of Madagascar

Enclosure

Many of the young men driven to sea for work were jobless as a result of land enclosures in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Communal areas for grazing livestock were fenced in and made private by landowners seeking greater profits from farming, leaving poor farmers without use of land that had been their by communal agreement for generations.
In Libertalia, the enclosure is of a unique variety; while the residents are now planning to erect hedges and fences, the land itself was distributed equally, making the pirates' practice once again an inversion of the early modern societal norms in Europe.

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