Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880–1914 (review)

At least since Martin Wiener's assertion in English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (1981) that by the 1850s rural life was seen as the true moral center of the English nation, it has been a scholarly commonplace that representations of the English countryside were conservative and backward looking, part of a symbolic formation allowing the English to block from consciousness the problems of urban industrialization and the wider British Empire. Paul Readman's ambitious and exacting study puts this thesis to the test. Looking to the surprisingly neglected debates surrounding land reform in the two decades before and after the turn of the twentieth century, Readman unearths late-Victorian and Edwardian visions of English rural life that were central to national character but not fundamentally conservative and escapist. Instead, land reformers saw the English land as crucial to the preservation of a national character that was decidedly democratic and technologically savvy at home, militaristic and imperial abroad.

While his approach is overwhelmingly that of a historian of the linguistic bent, Readman begins his study with an empirical survey establishing the significant presence of land reform in election speeches and party propaganda. In the wake of the late-century agricultural depression and the 1884 Reform Act that created a democratically identified nation still saddled with an anachronistically territorial system of land ownership, politicians of all stripes considered the "land question" as crucial to the peace and prosperity of England. The wide variety of reforms they proposed—free trade in the land, improved security of tenure for tenant farmers and guaranteed compensation for their improvements, the (voluntary or compulsory) allotment of small plots of land to farm laborers, the creation of an entire class of small cultivator-proprietors, a tax on the so-called unearned increment of land value, and the outright nationalization of the land—were all invoked as reforms not just of land, but of the English national character.

As Readman demonstrates, this wasn't an English national character imagined as timelessly isolated from modernity among the gently rolling hills of southern England. Land reform rhetoric on both sides of the aisle, Readman shows, expressed explicit concern with the technology of farming and the latest techniques of cultivation from the continent. They were also concerned with the imperial role that land played. Readman highlights the presence in land reform debates of the panic over racial degeneration caused by the British Army's near-defeat in the Boer War, as proponents argued that poor conditions in the countryside caused rural inhabitants to flee to the cities, or far beyond England. Getting the land system right, they argued, was key to getting the whole Empire right.

And it was key to national defense as well. Without a strong base of agricultural production within England itself, politicians argued, the country was vulnerable to blockades and invasions. The sense that national autonomy depended on the connection to literal land translated into a similar understanding of land as the grounds of individual autonomy. Over the course of forty years, public sympathy converged on any solution that might create a class of small landholders. This class, it was imagined, would prevent rural depopulation, urban overcrowding, and the possibility that large numbers of people without a stake in the soil would become susceptible to revolutionary impulses. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the small land holder was celebrated on both the right and the left as capable of all the proper home feelings that would orient him (and despite legal reforms that enhanced women's proprietary power, the imagined owner was always a "him") toward hard work, decorum, and a love of nation. His proprietary attachment to the land would also make him a defender of both nation and Empire, either through his contribution to what is now termed "food security," or, if...