This excellent addition to the Royal Historical Society's Studies in History New Series examines several aspects of the ‘land question’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, relating land to visions of national identity and to Conservative, Liberal and Labour political aims and strategies. Readman's focus is on the ‘discourse’ of land politics (p. 7), but he does not eschew empiricism, and makes a powerful case for the importance of land in the wider politics and culture of the period. Much of the subject-matter is familiar. Readman perhaps overstates previous historians’ neglect of the land question, but here it is examined from an original viewpoint, and used to draw convincing conclusions. In particular, Readman shows that nostalgic representations of the rural were not necessarily reactionary and conservative in nature, and influenced the outlook and policy of groups across the political spectrum.

After a long background chapter that outlines the history of land politics in this period, the book is divided into two parts. In the first, ‘Land Politics and National Issues’, Readman explains the evolution of Liberal and Conservative land reform programmes. He charts shifting attitudes to peasant proprietorship and other versions of land reform, showing how Tories increasingly linked small ownership to social and political stability in the face of a growing electorate, while Liberals emphasised the prior claim of the national interest over private property rights. Readman shows that restrictions on the freedom of landowners to do what they wanted with their land was not, as some historians have suggested, the result of Socialist influences, but rather the outcome of a longstanding approach to the land in the British Liberal tradition. Meanwhile, there were attempts by some Conservatives, notably Lord Winchilsea in his National Agricultural Union, about whom Readman has written at length in the English Historical Review, to designate agriculture as the ‘national industry’, and thereby to associate the support of agriculture with patriotic priorities. However, the ‘democratic trend’ (p. 94) of Conservative land reform language ensured the failure of Winchilsea's Union to advance the claims of a distinct agricultural interest.

The second part of the book, ‘Land Politics and Visions of England’, engages with a large debate on the nature of national identity, examining in particular the uses of history in all three political traditions. There was a widely resonant Liberal ‘narrative of disinheritance’ (p. 144), which urged the patriotic restitution of land that had been ‘robbed’ from the people by enclosure. Conservatives also drew on the past, increasingly citing the English yeoman as the model for their vision of peasant proprietorship, but, as Readman emphasises, this was not simply reactionary nostalgia: many Tories supported agricultural modernisation. Tories, as well as Liberals and Socialists, could look abroad for inspiration, in particular to Denmark, which served as a model for many reform proposals in this period. Readman shows that Socialists also made selective use of the rural past in their understanding of the land question. The ubiquity of historical perspectives on land, and the power of land as a political weapon in an increasingly democratic country, gave it a central place in discourses of national identity, and Readman shows that these discourses were more complex than some historians have acknowledged.

There are, inevitably, some notable omissions: there is very little discussion of labour colonies, for example, and the poor law, particularly the question of poor rates, is striking by its near-absence from the book. More quantitative data would have been useful in places: for example, it would be useful to know how many smallholdings and allotments were created under the provisions of the various pieces of legislation discussed in the book, and how large some of the organisations discussed actually were. Most significantly, although Readman concludes by downplaying the extent of the ‘town and country divide’ in English history, the politics of urban land are considered only briefly, right at the end of the book. However, Land and Nation in England is an impressive addition to the output of a prolific historian, and makes a very important contribution to the historiography of land, and of English politics in this period.