Empire and the Peasant Proprietor: Inter-Colony Land Reform in the Victorian Era

As the British Empire consolidated its geographical possession of distant lands by the 19th century, the agrarian nature of its colonies necessitated careful considerations about land tenure relationships. After intense debates around property rights and political economy, several land laws were enacted across the Empire between 1868 and 1875, which recognised the proprietary rights of peasant cultivators. Empire and the Peasant Proprietor examines this transformative shift in the imperial approaches to land tenure. Through a comparative analysis of historical land tenure arrangements in three diverse colonial sites, Punjab, Ireland, and Prince Edward Island, the book identifies two crucial mechanisms which facilitated the institutionalisation of peasant proprietorship. One, there was a fortuitous ideological alignment between important governing agents in the three colonies. Two, the debate about the impact of land reform in the colonies on the 'sanctity' of English principles was redirected, allowing for inter-colony analogies and precedents to support the proprietary rights of peasant cultivators. Empire and the Peasant Proprietor demonstrates the importance of these reciprocal influences within the imperial system and provides insight into contemporary challenges of secure land rights for a large proportion of the global population that continues to be dependent on agriculture for sustenance. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF dwnld from OUP and selected open access locations.

About the Author

Preet S. Aulakh is the Pierre Lassonde Chair in International Business at York University, Canada. He received doctorates in Law (Osgoode Hall Law School) and Business (University of Texas at Austin). He has published extensively on institutions and institutional change, intellectual property rights, emerging market multinationals, and global business. His recent books include Coping with Global Institutional Change and Mobilities of Labour and Capital , both published by Cambridge University Press. His research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and he has received several awards for his research, including a Gold Medal from the Academy of International Business.