Synopses & Reviews
The English countryside in the nineteenth century experienced the shifting power struggle from the great landed estates towards democratization. Challenging received scholarship that the landed estates declined in power and patronage Bujak places the Victorian globalization of trade alongside the democratization of the English countryside. By doing so he reveals that the economic decline of the great landed estates was balanced by their continued social and political influence in the countryside up to the Great War. With its focus on Suffolk, a county at the forefront of agricultural improvement and thus hardest hit by the agricultural depression, the patterns revealed by England's Rural Realm demonstrates the durability of the great estate system across the English countryside.
Review
"A mass of new material that successfully weaves the national with the local, correcting and illuminating more received wisdom as it goes." Professor R. W. Hoyle Professor of Rural History at the University of Reading
'Bujak argues a good case, bringing together economic history, political history, and rural social history, to show how the different strands interacted through the years of plenty and the years of dearth.' - J.V.Beckett, AGRICULTURAL HISTORY REVIEW, Vol. 56, 2008
About the Author
Edward Bujak is Assistant Professor of British Studies at Harlaxton College, the British Campus of the Universtiy of Evansville, Indiana.
Table of Contents
Introduction * The Great Victorian Estates & Their Owners * Agriculture & the Great Estates, 1837-1901 * The Landed Interest & the Land Question * Landowners & the 'Lock Out' * Landowners and Local Government * The Landowner and the Tenant- Farmer * Debt, Country Seats and Country Pursuits * The Great Estates Before the Great War * Conclusion *