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Access to Land. Land Reform and Commons Preservation In Donald Winch Access to land: land reform and commons preservation in nineteenth- century England A presentation given at the 75th Anniversary Conference of the Economic History Society in Glasgow as part of the sessions on ‘Morality, Markets and Policy’, Saturday, March 31, 2001 I My starting point in making some observations on an impossibly large topic will have to be a simple assertion. If one could conduct a canvas of opinion during the second half of the nineteenth-century on the deprivations and injustices associated with industrialization and urbanization, loss of access to land for purposes of work or leisure would come high on the lists of a large segment of the British public. There are also good grounds for thinking that the canvas would reveal this sentiment to have become more strident during the last two decades of the century. To students of the history of land reform agitation in England during this period, these assertions will appear commonplace; they underlie the activities of what can now be seen as a linked sequence of pressure groups dedicated to the removal of the actual and perceived deficiencies of the English system of land tenure. Instead of linked sequence one could also speak of a relay race combined with some features of the game of leap-frog – a mixed image that may provide a clue both as to momentum and to the failure to reach the finishing line in good order. While abolition of primogeniture and entail had remained staple elements on the agenda of reformers since the late eighteenth century, by the end of the nineteenth the campaign reached much further into the sanctum of private property in land. Radicals of the Cobden- Bright variety who espoused the cause of ‘free trade’ in land saw themselves as carrying the crusade against landed monopoly and aristocratic privilege to its logical conclusion by making the regulations surrounding the transfer of land conform to the priorities of a middle-class world of unrestricted commerce. From the late 1860s onward they found themselves being overtaken on their left by organisations such as the Land Tenure Reform 1 Association, the Land Nationalisation Society, and the various Land Restoration Leagues formed in the wake of Henry George’s speaking tours and his book on Progress and Poverty (1880). These associations were variously dedicated to the creation of peasant proprietorships and the curtailment of private landownership, wholly or in part, through nationalisation, municipalisation, and/or taxes based on the legitimacy of communal appropriation of the ‘unearned increment’ in rental incomes and urban site values. Weaving between these competing groups were the activities of the Commons Preservation Society designed to prevent urban landowners from infringing rights of access to common land in and around cities. Some of these ideas found their way into Joseph Chamberlain’s ‘unauthorised programme’ in 1885, and into the manifestos of the Liberal and Labour parties during the decades that span the turn of the century. From a party political perspective they can be seen as attempts to address the perceived needs of the new electorate created by the Second and Third Reform Acts, which added urban and rural working-class males to the middle-class electorate originally addressed by Cobdenites. In any written version of this communication a footnote would now be inserted directing attention to a distinguished body of secondary literature on this topic.1 Taking this literature as read, how does it relate to the theme of these sessions on ‘Morality, Markets and Policy’, bearing in mind the article on ‘Moral Choice and Economic Change’ that our organiser, Barry Supple, has given us as a starting point? The conviction that one of the most important, even tragic, consequences of economic change was rural depopulation and the progressive exclusion of the working classes from the benefits of landownership might appear to be part of a familiar lament based on a form of Virgilian nostalgia to which the British have been held to be peculiarly prone. Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ in the eighteenth century and William Wordsworth passim in the nineteenth were merely the leading poetic spokesmen for this mood. Some aspects of land reform are undoubtedly susceptible to such 1 For general treatments, in addition to the specific works cited in later footnotes, see M. Beer, A History of British Socialism, G Bell, London, 1929, Vol. II, pp. 237-45; H M. Lynd, England in the 1880s, New York, 1945; R. Harrison, Before the Socialists; Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861-1881, Routledge, London, 1965; D. E. Martin, ‘Land Reform’ in P. Hollis (ed), Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England, 1974; and R. Douglas, Land, People and Politics; A History of the Land Question in the United Kingdom, 1878-1952, 1976. 2 ‘pastoral’ or ‘romantic’ interpretations. But the feature on which I shall be focussing concerns the way in which the movement obtained leadership and support from a couple of generations of members of the professional middle classes, many of them priding themselves on being serious students of Britain’s economic history -- the kind of men who were accustomed to analysing contemporary institutions and policies in the languages of political economy.2 Plural usage here is required, first, to take account of the way in which the secular and deductive approach of emerging orthodoxy, chiefly associated with Ricardo and his followers, never established complete hegemony in public debate, even during its heyday.3 And secondly, because orthodox methods of analysis increasingly came under attack from historicists and inductivists from the 1860s onwards, despite the continued authoritative status of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848-71). Especially when confronting the problems raised by land tenure, agrarian economic history, the new form of evolutionary historical jurisprudence associated with Henry Maine, and comparative studies of land tenure furnished evidence that could be used to support or deny conclusions derived from a narrower form of economic analysis.4 Without suggesting that political economy in its increasingly mixed forms during the third quarter of the century was univocal, especially when it came to framing policies, one thing can be taken for granted: its exponents cannot be accused, as many of the spokesmen for radical, Chartist, and romantic agrarian alternatives can, of being hostile towards the self- interest principle, competition, and private property in general. Moreover, since support for 2 I have spoken of men because all those with whom I shall be concerned here were men. But there were some prominent women involved, notably John Stuart Mill’s step-daughter, Helen Taylor, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and Octavia Hill, with Hill’s interest emerging as a byproduct of her concern with the urban housing problem; see Octavia Hill, Homes of the London Poor, 1875, Cass reprint, 1970. 3 For Christian versions of political economy see Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785-1865, Oxford, 1988; and for the Malthusian variant D. Winch, Riches and Poverty; An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834, Cambridge, 1996. Part III. For a persistent conservative and protectionist challenge to orthodoxy see Anna Gambles. Protection and Politics; Conservative Economic Discourse, 1815-52, Royal Historical Society, The Boydell Press, 1999. 4 On the ways in which Maine and his Continental sources, chiefly von Maurer and Nasse, became embroiled in land reform politics see J. W. Burrow, ‘”The Village Community” and the Uses of History in Late Nineteenth-Century England’ in N. McKendrick (ed), Historical Perspectives; Studies in English Thought and Society in honour of J. H. Plumb, London: Europa Publications, 1974, pp. 255-84. See also C. Dewey, ‘Images of the Village Community: A Study in Anglo-Indian Ideology’, Modern Asian Studies, 6, 3, 1972, 291-328; ‘Particular Polities: Political Economy and the Historical Method’ in S. Collini, D. Winch, and J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics , Cambridge, 1983. [[/ 247-75; and A. Diamond (ed), The Victorian Achievment of Sir Henry Maine, Cambridge, 1991. 3 free trade was an issue on which most economists, if not economic historians, were univocal, their views on land reform had to recognize the global economic implications of any policy solutions they advocated. That such exponents of land reform could come to the conclusion that improving access to land was a practical goal worth pursuing through legislation and state intervention raises issues that go beyond rural preservation and conservation, the kinds of things we associate with the founding of bodies like the National Trust in 1895. Again, while my cast of land reformers was not entirely immune to such ideas, and has been found seriously wanting in qualities of hard-headedness on other grounds, what distinguished them was an obligation to show that their objectives conformed with political, economic, and administrative realities. To this one could add the fact that use of the state as an instrumentality was not the first recourse for a generation or two that had learned from domestic and foreign example the dangers of bureaucratic inefficiency, corruption, and special interest pleading. Any solutions proposed had to bear in mind such experience and be economically viable as well as desirable on other grounds. To avoid another kind of confusion, it has to be added that hard-headedness does not imply moral neutrality. Quite the reverse in fact, though a modicum of professional distance came with the academicization of economics and economic history at the end of the century. Campaigns against the English system of land ownership on whatever economic grounds were permeated by those powerful moral and political undercurrents which were fed by the well-known successes of the territorial aristocracy in retaining its position in local and national affairs, despite repeal of the Corn Laws and the passage of three reform bills.
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