| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Jamie L. Bronstein. Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1998. Pp. viii, 372. $55.00.

This book adds to a genre that is still too rare: distinguished studies that provide a transatlantic perspective on the nineteenth century. Jamie L. Bronstein has written a fine study of movements in Great Britain and the United States that aimed to secure working people on land of their own. It should be read not only by specialists in its respective national fields but also by those interested in the contribution that can be made by such transnational and comparative studies. 1

The book is centered on the 1840s and compares the Chartist land movement in England with the National Reform movement in the U.S. A third group, the Potters' Joint-Stock Emigration Society, which resettled English pottery workers on land in Wisconsin, also gets some attention. Bronstein provides convincing evidence that British and American land reform deserve to be examined together. They shared intellectual roots, in older writings from Thomas Harrington to Thomas Spence that provided a "common legacy" of land-reform ideas (p. 51), and in radical and conservative proposals of the 1820s and 1830s. They shared personnel and close interconnections, as followers of Feargus O'Connor in England and of George Henry Evans in America built their campaigns in the mid-1840s. Moreover, although America differed from Britain in its much wider franchise and availability of land for settlement, Bronstein argues that from the perspective of working-class land reformers these contrasts were relatively unimportant. . . .

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