Conjecture

Enclosure made farming relative, and that is why it produced innovation. Once land was enclosed, individual farms struggled or prospered relative to other farms, so unproductive farms had a huge incentive to innovate or intensify to keep up with more productive neighbours. That is Rumelt's standard applied to agriculture three centuries early: what mattered was not being right about farming but being more right than the farm next door. Enclosure rose from 2 percent of land at the start of the sixteenth century to 24 percent in the seventeenth and kept climbing.

Capital mechanisms