The drivers of fragmentation in arid and semi-arid landscapes

Abstract

The tone of Latimer's preaching was both weary and impatient - many meetings and sessions; but⋯ there cometh nothing forth. It might therefore amaze him to discover, four hundred and fifty years later and still counting, that he was observing a global process that continues to this day - the displacement of feudal or tribal systems of land holding to make way for exclusive tenure and commercial agriculture. In the 16th century, the Tudor English state was ambivalent about this novel process, afraid that enclosure would depopulate the countryside and sap the fighting strength of English armies relative to their continental rivals. But the authorities were either powerless or unwilling to halt commercial developments that they had helped to initiate and from which they profited (Tawney 1912).