Hardy peasants, passive landlords: translating difference into agrarian capitalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores changes in British liberal thought during the second half of the nineteenth century by investigating the work of Sir George Campbell, a Scottish MP and long-term colonial official in India who was influential on Gladstonian land reform in Ireland. Campbell’s life and writings show that colonial experience in Ireland and India were influential on the increasing desire to safeguard small farmers during a time of consolidation under agrarian capitalism. Many histories of these changes in British liberal thought focus instead on debates in political economy and the subsequent questioning of universal models that allowed policy to match social differences in various localities, like in Ireland and India. I instead highlight the myriad of influences that impacted Campbell’s romanticisation of small farmers, including morality, concepts of masculinity, a conservative criticism of modernity, agricultural science, and class anxieties. In the end, the rehabilitation of small farmers was meant to protect social hierarchies between a passive landlord benefitting from the productivity of his tenants, and between the modern scientist and the practical traditions of the small farmer.