Full context:   Sarah Tarlow, a professor of archaeology, has argued that the idea of “improvement” is so familiar to us today that it seems natural. It is therefore difficult to fully understand the history of “improvement” as a concept and to appreciate that it was a genuinely new way of thinking in the early modern period. Furthermore, in contemporary use, the notion of “improvement” is assumed to be positive. This assumption has limited the critical attention given to the history of the idea and the practices associated with it. For example, the enclosure of common land for private use was understood as an “improvement” in the eighteenth century. But this had both positive and negative effects for the different people involved. The poor family who were denied a crucial means of subsistence did not regard the newly enclosed fields as “better”.