I would encourage you to read the 1953 book The worldly philosophers By the American economist Robert Heilbroner. The early part of this book covers the enclosure acts. I will refer to this book throughout my response because the brief section that he covers this time period is laid out the best way that I have found, particularly because of how concise it is.

To answer your question, kind of. the enclosure movement was a major factor transforming the existing working class into a different version.

In the book, Heilbroner quotes Queen Elizabeth. For context. She had just returned from a tour of her kingdom. She complains that, Paupers are everywhere! This is a complaint but also a question of where did all these poor people come from because barely 100 years prior the land was filled with peasants also referred to as the yeoman.

It’s important to clarify the distinction between peasants and paupers. A lot of people today think that peasants were the bottom rung on the latter. But they were actually not that bad off. The peasants tilled their own land and Heilbroner notes that, …the yeoman, the pride of England, the largest body of free, and prosperous citizens in the world.

Now paupers on the other hand we’re actually the bottom rung on the ladder, if they were even on the ladder. The peasants and yeoman were probably more comparable to a lower middle class and the paupers were the lowest class.

Heilbroner notes, Deprived of the right to use the common land, he (the pauper) could no longer maintain himself as a “farmer”. Since no factories were available, he could not -even if he had wanted to- metamorphose into a factory worker. Instead, he became the most miserable of all social classes, an agricultural proletarian, and where agricultural work was lacking, a beggar, sometimes a robber, usually a pauper.

The key here is that the enclosures started occurring some 160ish years before the industrial revolution kicked off. Certainly victims of later enclosure acts moved to cities and became part of the working class. But many of the early paupers were stuck and didn’t have the opportunity to do much.

The enclosures understandably caused a lot of riots and uprisings. Heilbroner notes that 3,500 people were killed in one uprising. In one enclosure act in 1820, 15,000 peasants were removed from just under 800k acres of land. This is just a few examples of what was going on. When you note that the enclosures took place between the early 1600s and early 1900s. You can really get the sense for how much of an event this was. Some 5000 plus enclosure acts took place during this time.

There was a massive amount of people living in utter poverty. The ruling class tried to prevent uprisings by doing the bare minimum. Heilbroner notes that often times, these people were assigned to their local parish to be cared for, many people were forced to live in parochial workhouses dubbed “houses of terror”, and in some cases paupers were given an acre or two of land (not enough to thrive on). Heilbroner argues that the ruling class wasn’t explicitly cruel, but they lacked the understanding of a fluid and mobile labor force. Instead of sending the paupers where work was to be done, they tied them to their local churches and exasperated the problem.

So you see that you already had a working class in the peasants/yeoman. The enclosures destroyed the stability and turned the peasants into paupers. when the industrial revolution did kick into gear, many of these people flocked to cities to find work because that was better than being a pauper. The real question is, how many peasants would have left the countryside to work in factories?

I ask this question because there was a lot of changes in behavior during the rise in early capitalism. Before capitalism, you really only did the same job that your father did. In the time leading up to Adam Smith and the industrial revolution, you start to see the majority of people start to make more decisions with demand and supply in mind (and especially after smith because he laid it out in the open for everyone to see). This notion was evident in the enclosures. The people who controlled the land in the feudal system could make more profits from wool than by letting the peasants farm the land. So out with the peasants.

My question is, if the enclosures never took place, how many of the peasants would have weighed supply and demand in their own best interest and left the countryside to be a factory worker? I am willing to bet quite a few would have on their own and you would still have had a modern working class. Think about how many young American adults willingly left their family farms to work in cities (and contributed to being part of the working class). There is a working class in the US too and we didn’t have the enclosure acts fundamentally change everything like the UK did. Granted a large part of our working class was also immigrants, so it’s not a perfect example, but lots of people fled farmlife for city life.

The key difference is that these paupers were forced to do this once the industrial revolution started in England because they had no other options. I would say that the closest thing to this that the American farmers had was the Great Depression and the dust bowl in the early 20th century. You had a lot of people that were content with being farmers. But circumstances outside of their control forced them to be what Heilbroner described above as paupers. This caused a lot of people to move to other areas to farm (think the protagonists of grapes of wrath) or give up farming and move to the cities to look for opportunities. But again, this was much later and the industrial revolution had already been a thing in America for quite some time. This shows that early on, some farmers stayed while some moved to the cities for a different life. But when things got tough and they because paupers, they almost all looked to move.

Again. To answer your question, I would say kind of. There was already a working class called the Yeoman/peasants. Many of these people would have likely moved to the cities after the industrial revolution anyway. But the enclosures probably forced a larger number to do so anyway. So yeah it had an impact, but there likely would have been a working class anyway.

If anything, the enclosures showed the lower class what the upper classes were willing to do to them for their bottom line. If anything this encouraged the working class to work together and unite as unions and political parties more than they might have otherwise, but they still likely would have done these things anyway.

As for modern people tiring this to their political parties and groups. It’s typically a good strategy to portray yourself as a victim, or underdog, or as being on the right side of history. It keeps your base engaged and keeps voter turnout up.