The Great Flattening: Enclosure, Extraction and the New Age of Concentrated Power is a new open-access book comprising a collection of standalone essays that argue we are living through the largest expansion of enclosure since the commons were fenced off centuries ago.  

Journeying from the Teifi Valley in Wales to the streets of India and the Netherlands, the book traces the common logic linking industrial farming, tourism, smart cities, platform culture, disappearing regional traditions and the erosion of biological diversity.  

Its central argument is simple. What began with the enclosure of land has steadily expanded into the enclosure of culture, biology, knowledge, communities and even human attention. Across every sphere of life, complexity is reduced, diversity gives way to standardisation, and local autonomy is absorbed into systems that are easier to measure, manage and commodify.  

Rather than treating farming, cities, technology, culture and ecology as separate subjects, The Great Flattening develops a distinctive framework that reveals them as interconnected expressions of a single historical process: the expansion of enclosure into the cultural, ecological and biological flattening of contemporary life.  

Drawing on examples ranging from artisan cheese, modern architecture and the human microbiome to smart cities, industrial farming, tourism and digital surveillance, the essays demonstrate how this process is reshaping both landscapes and everyday life.  

Key Themes  

The Expansion of Enclosure  

The book traces how enclosure evolved from the fencing of common land into a global system that increasingly encloses landscapes, housing, food systems, culture, information and everyday life. What once happened to land is now happening across society.  

The Flattening of Landscapes and Culture  

Cities, villages and agricultural landscapes are increasingly reorganised around predictability, commercial throughput and corporate control. Historic communities become curated destinations, local traditions become content and regional identities give way to global uniformity.  

Biological Flattening  

The logic of flattening extends beyond landscapes into life itself, including the human microbiome. Indigenous seeds are replaced by proprietary genetics, diverse ecosystems by monocultures, regional livestock by standardised breeds, traditional foods by industrial formulations and living microbial relationships by corporate-managed biological systems. The enclosure of land culminates in the enclosure of biology.  

Technology as Instrument  

Rather than driving change, technology is presented as the infrastructure through which capitalism extends enclosure into new domains. As an economic system that depends on continual expansion and the conversion of life into value, capitalism requires ever more areas of society to become standardised, legible and commercially exploitable. Digital technologies make that process faster, deeper and more pervasive than ever before.  

Resistance and Agency  

Written in the tradition of resistance literature, the book defends the sacred, the messy and the unpredictable aspects of life that resist total commodification. It argues that because flattening is manufactured, it is neither natural nor inevitable. Throughout the essays, examples of ecological restoration, regional knowledge, regenerative agriculture and community resilience point towards the possibility of ‘unflattening’ the world.  

A Civilisational Crisis  

Rather than examining farming, cities, tourism, food, technology and culture in isolation, The Great Flattening offers a single framework for understanding social change.  

The essays contend that we are witnessing not a series of disconnected crises but a single civilisational transformation: the progressive replacement of ecological, cultural and biological diversity with systems designed for enclosure, extraction and concentrated power.  

Each chapter stands alone, but together they reveal a coherent map of contemporary power—and suggest that because these systems have been historically constructed, they can also be unmade.  

The Great Flattening: Enclosure, Extraction and the New Age of Concentrated Power can be read online or downloaded for free here.  

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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Visit the author’s substack, https://substack.com/@colintodhunter.

Featured image is from the author

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