Landed Responses to Land Reform in Scotland and Ireland, c. 1860–1903

Abstract

This chapter considers transnationally how the landed and aristocratic classes responded to the challenge of legislative land reform in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. As a social group, they were broadly coherent, linked by blood, marriage and interests. Many landed families owned land across national boundaries or were related to those who did. They congregated politically at Westminster and socially in London’s clubland and their country estates. As such, the ways in which they framed land issues and reform were shared, whether in England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland, despite the legislative differences in land reform. The chapter examines their conceptions of land and property, their responses to the legislative challenges made to those assumptions and how (and if) they organised themselves as a body in an attempt to neutralise or slow down the pace of reform. This analysis is set against the wider context of political, social, economic and territorial changes faced by the landed classes in this period, commonly identified as one of decline, if not outright fall. Lastly, the chapter discusses the role played by the British Empire in landed responses to land issues.