ABSTRACT
Irish agriculture’s shift from a system of landlord-and-tenant to peasant proprietorship was the product of an on-again, off-again Land War that lasted from 1879 to 1903. Broadly speaking, the landlord-tenant cleavage complemented the division between pro-British Unionism and Irish Nationalism. Moreover, again broadly speaking, the demise of the landlords entailed a return of the land to people who saw themselves as descendants of those who had lost their lands in the bloody Tudor, Jacobean, Cromwellian, and Williamite confiscations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The myth of vicarious dispossession distorted the historical record since, as far as the native masses were concerned, the confiscations for the most part had meant new landlords rather than dispossession. By the early eighteenth century the bulk of Irish land had passed from Gaelic or Old English (as the Catholic descendants of earlier conquerors are known) to New English or Scottish land owners. The myth also ignored the fact that a sizeable minority of tenants were the descendants of planters and immigrants who had arrived at the time of the confiscations. Though the Land War was really a struggle about who should capture the Ricardian rents, both sides emphasized the implications for farm productivity. Those implications have been much debated, then and since. The research of recent decades suggests that while farmers’ rhetoric exaggerated the likely gains, landlords exaggerated the likely losses.
