Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 2 (2022), p. 318

This book is a useful collection of essays on land reform in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland since 1800. It emphasizes the key differences between the four nations, arguing that there has been ‘an imbalance of intensity between Scotland, Ireland and Wales, where land reform centred on the nature and conditions of tenure, protections and land distribution, and England, where it has been more diffuse, feeding into a multitude of debates, including enclosure, commons, game, housing and conservation’. The book is made up of 14 ‘original case studies’, written by a range of contributors, mainly historians but also including lawyers and estate managers, offering expertise and life experiences outside the traditional domain of academic historians.

The book is organized into four areas of interest: (1) tenants, landowners and estate management, (2) agitation and agendas for reform, (3) legislation and its impact and (4) landowner responses, illustrating a multiplicity of relationships and connections between high politics and local experiences. As is the case for many essay collections, the book had its origins in a conference, here organized by the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates (Maynooth University), the Centre for Scotland’s Land Futures (University of Dundee), and the Institute for the Study of Welsh Estates (Bangor University). The conference held in 2018 identified ‘that there were gaps in our knowledge of landed histories and that such voids impeded a better understanding of our respective historical narratives’. Like many studies of the Land Question, it focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘but with considerations of earlier contexts and later legacies, sometimes extending into the present day’, noting that in Scotland, and to a lesser extent in England and Wales, it is still very much a live political issue.

An essay by Professor Terence Dooley from Maynooth University, shows how the dramatic transfer of land ownership in Ireland from landlord to tenant between 1870 and 1909 (the creation of a ‘peasant proprietorship’) was quite different from the rest of the UK, highlighting the influence of nationalism and anti-English landlord sentiments on the nature of the Land Question in one of the four nations. This clearly differentiated Ireland from England for example, where such influences were largely absent. Another case study by Tony McCarthy, a graduate of Maynooth University and an accountant and stockbroker, on the wealth management practices of Irish Landlords, 1903–1930, describes the way 70 per cent of agricultural land of Ireland had been sold to their former tenants by the 1930s. In contrast to the situation in the Free State, another essay on the Northern Ireland Land Act of 1925 by Olwen Purdie, Professor of History at Queen’s University Belfast, shows how Westminster protected the interests of the landed class ensuring that they remained in possession of their untenanted land.

The book identifies a range of different traditions of land reform in Scotland and Wales. In Scotland, where the long-term historical influence of the highland clearances played a key role, legislation placed the concept of community at its core in for example the Crofter’s Holding Act 1886, the Land Reform Acts of 2003 and 2016, and the Community Empowerment Act of 2015. This in turn influenced legislation in Ireland, India and non-imperial territories such as Tsarist Russia. An essay by Micky Gibbard, who has worked on heritage projects and completed a thesis on the planned village movement in eighteenth-century Scotland, argues that the collective memory and history of the Highlands and Islands ‘was a vital inducement for forcing through land legislation between 1886 and 1931 and again from 1955 to the present day.’ In Wales other local influences were at play not directly linked to the politics of the Land Question. Shaun Evans, the Director of the Institute for the Study of Welsh Estates, argues in an essay on the North Wales Property Defence Association (1886–1896), that it was changes in local government, heavy taxation and loss of income, that led to the sale and break up of Welsh Estates on a massive scale, ‘allowing thousands of former tenants to become freehold farmers in their own right across the early decades of the twentieth century.’ A similar process of took place in England after 1918, although many farmers were bought out by larger landowners later on.

In the introduction, the editors note the lack of studies tackling legislative land reform programmes from an English perspective, citing Cragoe and Readman’s, The Land Question in Britain, 1750–1950 (Basingstoke, 2010) as the only main source. My own studies of the Land Question in England after 1914 – The failure of land reform in England in the twentieth century: The triumph of private property (Abingdon, 2019: see the Review, 67.1) and The history of opposition to blood sports in twentieth century England (Abingdon, 2017) – trace the way concerns over land control and ownership were reflected in a wide range of political debates throughout the twentieth century suggesting that the Land Question in England was far from moribund or no longer relevant in an industrial and urban country divorced from the countryside, unlike Ireland, Scotland and to a lesser extent Wales. These debates covered the controversial issues of town and country planning and development control, taxation (the policy of betterment replacing Henry George’s Single Tax, eventually developing into Section 106 agreements seeking to claw back the profits of land speculation), ‘the unearned increment’ for the community, agricultural reform and the role of smallholdings, public access to the countryside, moorlands and mountains (still highly controversial), opposition to hunting based partly on the misuse of land for sport rather than for more useful productive purposes, the role of charitable landowners such as the National Trust (which many Labour politicians after 1945 saw as an alternative to land nationalization), and not least the on-going housing crisis, based as it is primarily on remarkable and inflationary increases in land values.