Land and Revolution examines the development of the land question, and its relationship to the evolution of nationalist politics, in Ireland between the fall of Parnell in 1891 and the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. One conclusion of Land and Revolution was the manner it revealed that anti-landlord conflict remained very important after 1903. Another notable conclusion was the challenge it presented to the arguments of David Fitzpatrick and others concerning the potential for radical social change during the course of the Irish revolution. The wider intellectual and political context within which Land and Revolution was written is explored as Fergus Campell recounts the circumstances that led him to consider ordinary people collectively as influential actors in the historical process, and to make the argument that through their land agitations they succeeded in transforming their own lives by forcing the British government to introduce reformist land legislation. The chapter concludes with Fergus Campbell indicating how he has changed his mind about some aspects of his argument and approach since the publication of Land and Revolution.
The question of land in Ireland has long been at the heart of political, social and cultural debates. In eleven essays a group of authors including some of the most influential historians and social scientists of modern Ireland, and up-and-coming scholars, explore Ireland's land questions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book is divided into three sections, the first of which presents the current state of our understanding of the issue of land in Ireland in two survey essays that cover the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book's second section presents a series of reflections in which historians and social scientists look back on how they have approached the topic of land in Ireland in their earlier writings. A third section presents some innovative new research on various aspects of the Irish land question.