ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 identifies the way land reform movements up to the First World War represented a wide variety of intellectual and class-based traditions responding in different ways to the long-term growth of capitalist property relationships and how they underpinned wider demands for radical political change, especially the campaign for the vote. The chapter highlights the influence of communitarian, socialist and utopian thought, natural rights theories and classical political economy. It describes the early growth in England of a private land market creating the circumstances for the eventual triumph of private property as the primary form of land tenure. It also outlines the way that land reform movements developed from the seventeenth century in response to the loss of rights to common land and in opposition to the concentrated political power of the landed classes, and how land reform became a major feature of nineteenth century politics, reaching a climax in the late Victorian and Edwardian period with the ‘People’s Budget’ of Lloyd George in 1909, which included for the first time an attempt by central government to tax the unimproved value of land. The chapter notes the way the demand for taxation of land values survived into the twentieth century as a powerful idea.
