Tenant Right & Agrarian Society in Ulster, 1600-1870.
Author: DOWLING, Martin W.
Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999. xii, 388 pages. Hardback.
In recent decades investigations into the ‘land question’ have been central to contemporary understanding of Irish Society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the importance of the relationships between landlords and tenants to the cultural, social, and political history of post-famine Ireland is now widely understood, the historical development of those relationships over the previous two centuries has been neglected. In this ambitious historical inquiry–based on the manuscript records of over sixty landed estates and a wealth of published material–Martin Dowling uncovers the fascinating pre-history of the land question from its seventeenth-century origins to the dawn of the era of legislative reform.
Dowling focuses on the development of the anomalous ‘Ulster Custom’ of tenant right, by which tenants claimed property rights anterior to and more fundamental than their contracts with landlords, allowing them to exact a payment well in excess of the yearly rent from those who succeeded to their farms. By lending an attentive ear to the changing and conflicting interpretations of the meaning of tenant right, Dowling reveals the persistent contradictions in the Irish property system that were later to explode in the land war of the 1880s. In the first book-length treatment of the subject, Dowling integrates the development of historical relationships between landlords, tenants, and cottiers with transformations in the rural economy, the colonial reorganisation of the landscape, the advance estate management, and debates over the nature of Irish political economy. The result is an engaging and informative narrative of a crucial era in Ulster’s history.
ISBN: 0716525925
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