>I'm forwarding Michael Perelman's work
>*************************
>Still, this dispossession was legal in a sense. After all, the peasants did
>not have property rights in the narrow sense. They only had traditional
>rights. As markets evolved, first land-hungry gentry and later the
>bourgeoisie used the state to create the legal structure, which could
>abrogate these traditional rights (Tigar 1977).
In Britain the concept of "common law" was, and to some extent still is, well enshrined in its legal system. Generally, the peasants were unlawfully and forcefully dispossessed. Those with the money, the dispossessors, could apply to Parliament for an Act to be passed which would retrospectively legalise the process.
>No society went so far as the British in terms of primitive accumulation.
The former USSR achieved the same result in a fraction of the time in the 1920s and 1930s: the creation of a class of landless wage labourers.
-- Lew