Ian Angus. The War Against the Commons. Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism. Monthly Review Press, New York 2023. 277 pp. $26.00. (Cloth: $89.00; E-book: $26.00.)

Ian Angus has published several books on eco-socialism and edits the online journal Climate & Capitalism.His work has consistently promoted and defended the eco-Marxist understanding that the climate crisis has resulted from capitalism's internal contradictions, which cannot be overcome without radical change.While this was once a fringe position within climate activism, now even popular figures such as Greta Thunberg have acknowledged the necessity of anti-capitalism in different forms.Outside the context of Western climate politics, socialists, peasant movements, and indigenous peoples across the world have long been concerned with capitalism's destructive impact on the earth.Given this political context, there may never have been a more urgent need for understanding the history of capitalism and its relationship with land and the environment.It is this need that Angus seeks to address in his latest book, The War Against the Commons.In his book, Angus outlines the history of enclosure in England and Scotland from the Middle Ages until the modern period.During this period, commons (communally held lands) were privatized and peasant cultivators were expropriated on an increasingly large scale.Angus's main argument is that the development of agrarian capitalism, and ultimately industrial capitalism, was facilitated by this expropriation and violence.Furthermore, these developments in England were partially dependent on colonial exploitation and slavery, as will be detailed below.To readers familiar with the work of Karl Marx, this line of argumentation might seem familiar.Indeed, Angus's analysis is almost entirely based on Marx's as presented in the chapter on "so-called primitive accumulation" in Capital, Vol. 1.The contribution Angus seeks to make, therefore, is not to present an entirely original analysis of the enclosures, but to outline this important history in an accessible form while engaging with the wealth of scholarship and evidence which has become available since Marx's death.The book includes an introduction and three main sections consisting of four to five chapters each.Part One focuses on "the first great wave of enclosures", which started in the fifteenth century, accelerated in the first half of the seventeenth century, and lasted up until the "English Revolution" of the 1640s (p.12).Angus describes the commons-based agriculture of the Middle Ages while critiquing the traditional narrative of the "tragedy of the commons" and details the mechanisms and actors involved in the enclosures (ch.1).He follows Marx's analysis as he describes the creation of a large population of landless peasants in the early modern period who were forced to become proletarian workers in the growing urban industries or settlers and bonded labourers