Book Review

Land Reform and the Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States is the first modern comparative study we have of land reform in the two nations. Though focusing on the 1840s, the heyday of land reform in each nation, Jamie L. Bronstein takes a longish look backwards as well as a shorter forward glance. He opens with an institutional history of the major land reform groups (the National Reform Association as against the Chartist Co-Operative Land Company and the Potters' Joint-Stock Emigration Society), and in succeeding separate chapters he examines his movements' intellectual roots, internal structures, social bases, and political achievements. Though the text is sometimes long-winded and anecdotal, it admirably reveals how, on the one hand, antebellum Americans tamed the radical agrarianism of Thomas Skidmore and how, on the other, their British counterparts breathed radicalism into a prevailing form of Tory land reform. It goes on to show that the movements borrowed liberally from one another, boasted experienced leaders (and sometimes tragic ones such as the Chartist Feargus O'Connor), and mobilized followers around similar appeals to personal independence that promoted the family plot or homestead as refuge from the factory.

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