The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in 19th-Century Britain and Ireland by Sara L. Maurer (review)

Abstract

MAURER, SARA L. The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in 19th-Century Britain and Ireland. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. 243 pp. $60.00. In The Dispossessed State, Sara Maurer argues attitudes about property changed in Ireland and Britain during the nineteenth century, creating revolution in thinking about the (1). Writers and thinkers moved from a belief property exists prior to the state to a belief the state comes first, creates the right to property, and then can limit those rights for the common good. In five exhaustively researched chapters, Maurer describes a Manichean struggle between these opposing views in the writings of such figures as Maria Edgeworth, John Stuart Mill, George Campbell, Anthony Trollope, George Moore, George Meredith, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, the members of the Young Ireland movement, and many others. Although she does not proclaim her study to be postcolonial or new historicist, it is, in fact, both. For its methodology, it draws heavily upon the techniques of discourse analysis and rhetorical criticism, and lurking behind many of the book's investigations is the Foucaultian belief in discourse we can observe and understand the exercise of power. Her purpose in the book is to redirect the scholarly conversation away from thinking about property purely in terms of capitalism. The discourse surrounding property, she argues, had a role to play in helping to form national identity for both countries during this period. Her assertions about this point are carefully nuanced because she respects its complexity, but as a result the reader must somewhat piece together the consequences of this change in thinking. One clear consequence, however, is the dialogue cast new light on the relationship between Ireland and Britain. Maurer writes the vision of Irish property crafted by Irish nationalists who advocated for an independent Irish nation-state ... strongly attracted the British politicians most responsible for crafting a means to keeping Ireland and Britain united (91). In the Irish conception of property, British writers and thinkers saw an opportunity for uniting the two nations. But unrest in Ireland also exposed tensions between competing English narratives. On one hand England followed the discourse articulated by William Blackstone property is that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe (qtd. …