| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 52

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Richard Rodger, The Transformation of Edinburgh: Land, Property and Trust in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001)

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN to the scholarship of the last generation concerning the rise of urban capitalism — in all its class, gender, family, legal, business, political, and organizational implications — if the "liberal" notion of freehold property was missing from the equation?

Richard Rodger, of the University of Leicester, and one of the icons of urban history in Britain, gives us an inkling, and gently suggests we may wish to adjust our understandings somewhat in the light of his study of 19th-century Edinburgh, even if it is a study that is largely concerned with residental housing development.

Rodger's Edinburgh, however, is not based on a counterfactual, "what if?" but rests on the fact that there was no freehold property in Edinburgh in the 19th century, or in Scotland for that matter until the 1970s. A modern, western European, capitalist city developed in the 19th century in the context of what Rodger calls a "modern" feudal system, that is, out of "absolutist" as much as liberal assumptions regarding property.

As much of our understanding of urban growth, its relationship to capitalism, and its ethos rests on assumptions about property, in particular that "unrestrained ownership of property was at the core of [an] 18th-century value system with freedom and equality of status conveyed by an individual's control over property," (506) Rodger's Edinburgh in some measure de-links property ownership and capitalism, and seems to suggest that for capitalism to thrive, as it did in Edinburgh, other foundations are possible and must be considered.

Rodger intimates they may be found in his excursion into the "legal and institutional structure" (4) of the city, which is what, he says, his book is actually about. Is it really the "legal and institutional structure," not freehold, that matters?

Regardless, what emerges, Rodger acknowledges, stems from the central question of "Who owned Edinburgh?" (26) At bottom, only the Crown did, as all land was held in the form of a Royal grant to a heritable owner (or "superior"), and then through a complex chain of vassals ("feuers" and "sub-feuers") to people who actually built homes, usually for others who lived in them as owners or lessees.

The system, however, was "modern" in two respects. First, "land was conveyed" to a "feuer for his use in perpetuity, on condition that a small annual feu-duty was also payable 'for all time coming.'" (53) That is, for the most part, the feu-duty was the only financial obligation (though as land was sub-divided, this was complicated by a chain of sub-feu duties). There were, in addition, constraints, in the form of a "feu-charter" on how the land could be used.

The growth of the "feu-charter" stemmed from an 1818 court decision that ruled the 18th-century "feu-plan" for Edinburgh's New Town was insufficiently detailed to control property development, and from that point on virtually all land in the city was conveyed with increasingly detailed feu-charters attached, most prepared in the numerous law offices of the Scottish capital, to ensure a form of development that would protect the value of the heritable land and the feu-duty attached to it.

The feu-duty was a valuable commodity: it was 'for all time coming'; and in case of, say, bankruptcy of the feuer, the feu-duty took precedence over all other obligations. It was not only a valuable commodity, it was iron-clad.

As a result, heritable property was often at the core of the personal and institutional "trusts" of the title of the book, cobbled together by the lawyers of the city to protect the income of downstream generations, or of endowed institutions, mainly hospitals and schools. Such trusts were major landholders, at one point controlling some twenty per cent of all holdings of more than an acre, and only surpassed in this regard by railways and the city itself.

It is in this context that the book unfolds, focussed on residential development in a city that grew from 67,000 in 1801 to nearly 300,000 by 1901, a not uncommon trajectory for major centres in the period, and against the structural ups and downs of the housing market of the period. Most residential development was in the hands of private developers, leavened somewhat by a major workers' co-operative and toward the end of the period by civic intervention. There appears to have been very little self-building, possibly due to financial and legal complexities, but Rodger is largely silent in this regard.

Rodger dives deeply into each of these areas, particularly private development, including a detailed examination of James Steel, a bankrupt who became the city's largest residential developer. Steel's experience, as that of the workers' co-op and civic endeavours, is compared to the overall pattern derived from Rodger's massive research into civic documents, like tax rolls, and the reams of feu-charters registered in the "sasines," or what might be called the feudal rolls. All, furthermore, is considered in relation to the current literature on most aspects of the urban process.

In a volume of so many departures, of such meticulous and comprehensive research, and by such an informed scholar, only some of the questions raised by Rodger can be touched on in a short review.

How was capital raised? Essentially by using the prospect of income from the inassailable feu-duty as collateral; or in the case of a heritable owner, commuting ownership to free, locked-in capital and investing it in housing, industrial, or other opportunities.

Who invested? Rodger indicates this modern feudal system tended to broaden investment opportunities. The security of the feu-duty and the protection of the feu-charter drew people of limited means into the development process, especially widows, spinsters, and elite labour and avoided the paradox of liberal freehold as tending toward monopoly while at the same time held to be the foundation of liberty, freedom, and even democracy.

How did developers protect themselves against the vagaries of the market? Private developers, like Steel, developed a practice of incorporating a range of accommodation within a single development, one that served a range of needs, from singles to families, and a range of classes. Changed family conditions would trigger internal movement usually within the familiar development to a bigger or smaller space, or to cheaper or more expensive space. Rents could sometimes be negotiated to better conform to demand. A mixed residental culture emerged.

The major workers' co-operative accomplished the same thing by spreading its housing developments geographically. Economic changes, and consequently élite labour requirements, appear to have been worked out in city space, not, like the middling classes, within a single development.

What did the feuing system mean for urban and architectural design? In many respects, it created fairly substantial but conservative housing, generally dictated by the feu-charters. Orthodoxy in style was a motif: tenements were described as a four-storey equivalent of a medieval wall with windows; much middle-class construction was in a Scottish baronial style. Power and social order, Rodger says, are the messages conveyed, and are coupled with ego-adornment, often in the form of plaques, memorializing the builder, whether private, trust, worker, or civic, and often containing Scottish nationalist motifs.

In the case of urban design, the feu-charter largely took precedence over the plan. What did the feuing system mean for the worker? Edinburgh, despite its swarms of professionals, was nonetheless an industrial city by any standard, and, Rodger intimates, housing for workers, as it played out in the capital, served in some measure to integrate the worker into the larger community.

Class cleavages were not as pronounced as compared to Glasgow, operating under the same general system, but with a different pattern of development, especially in the public housing area. In matters of class, Rodger seems to be saying, "it depends." Urban exceptionalism?

This seemed particularly true in the case of the workers' colony housing developed by the Edinburgh Co-operative Building Company (formed in the 1860s in the wake of a lockout of the building trades). This housing was special and attractive: doubles featuring two external entrances and a small garden, which, with other features, "insinuated a different vision of urban living into the mentality of the Edinburgh working class." (369)

But there was a downside to the feuing system: the chain of vassalage, of sub-feuers, generally meant higher unit rent for the eventual occupier, and, as a result, Edinburgh residences tended to be less affordable and more cramped than their English freehold or leasehold equivalents.

Scotland is a rarity in modern capitalist development in its so extensive alternative systems to freehold property. In Canada, there is the seigneurial system but it ends in the 1850s at the beginning of the modern period. There is also Ottawa in its Bytown days, when British Ordnance operated two leasing systems, one that precluded voting because the "quitrents" were so low, and the other that generated a shacktown because the leases were so short. One of the few, on-going contemporary systems is in Canberra. In the Australia capital territory, all land is held by the federal Crown, and conveyed on 99-year leases joined to something like a feu-contract that sets out rents, development conditions, and the like. There is pressure for 99-year leases, or freehold by another name.

Does land ownership matter to capitalism? Perhaps and perhaps not. But alternative systems of ownership, if Edinburgh is an example, may matter a great deal to the nature and shape of a city and of its society. It may also matter a great deal to contemporary theory premised on freehold notions.

As Rodger points out in his conclusion, with the feu-system, "investment leakages were contained" in a place with limited financial resources. "Limited supplies of capital were recirculated to enrich Scottish economic growth and urban development." (507) Along with the institutional innovations, like the trusts, "urban development in Scotland was liberated by the feuing system." (508)

What the author does not tell us is why freehold eventually prevailed. Perhaps by the 20th century it did not matter. Or perhaps to capital, it mattered a great deal.


John H. Taylor Carleton University

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.