This article studies the classic period of parliamentary enclosure in England to show how territory and territoriality acquired a strategic role in the regulation of processes of social reproduction, containing but also going beyond traditional understandings of land and property as ends in themselves. Articulating a Marxist and a Foucauldian perspective, the piece compares the autonomous, self-managed spatialities of the commons to the new regime of dependent, disciplined social reproduction triggered by enclosure. Dispossession —of material resources, social institutions and community representations— thus appears as a foundational moment of capitalist territorialization, an element intrinsic to large-scale reorganizations of the rural world for the creation of broader markets and geographies of extraction, according to the dictate of budding industrial cities.