ABSTRACT
In any discussion over the relationship between landownership and power, it is tempting to see nineteenth-century Britain as a special case. It was the first nation to experience an industrial revolution and, while recent writing has stressed this revolution’s ‘evolutionary’ nature, it cannot be disputed that the process of industrialism greatly expanded opportunities for wealth creation in the non-landed sector of the economy.1 It has been tempting to follow Marx’s massive, over-simple schema and characterize nineteenth-century Britain as witnessing a struggle for power between ‘landed’ and ‘bourgeois’ property. Economically determined ‘historical forces’ ensured that the former was bound to lose and, on this analysis, nineteenth-century British society is studied in order to understand the process whereby the landed classes lost their grip on power.
