This elegantly produced and erudite treatise is a detailed reassessment of the potential significance of contrasting inherited English land ownership systems from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century, together with their associated social structures and histories, ideologies and regional production systems, for the understanding of the roots of the American Civil War (1861–1865). It does so within generally well-documented historiographical contexts, notably the debates around the ideas of Eugene Genovese and Eric Foner, inter alia, which place emphasis on the roles of an industrial urbanised north contrasted with a rural thinly urbanised south.

James Huston is mainly concerned with contrasts between large English gentry estates and American plantations of the south on the one hand, and English small farm systems that fed into those of the northern states on the other. This contrast is reflected in the slave labour of the plantation and the intense domestic labour of the smaller farm unit: ‘thus northern and southern agricultural evolution can be viewed at the forefront of the sectional controversy’ (p. xi), with a résumé of English agricultural evolution over four hundred years as a background comparator.

The book is structured in three parts. Part I is concerned with ‘the English and British Agricultural Standard, 1300–1880’, which reviews the translation from England to North America of crops, techniques, property rights and market disposition, together with the significance of the physical environment and its geographies, inherited English landownership patterns, and English criteria of standards by which American agricultural development was judged.

Chapters on ‘The English Civil War and the Birth of the Free Labor Ideology’ and ‘The Standard: British agriculture, 1660–1870’ make up Part I, and examine the extent of the roots of the free labour ideology in changing English social and political developments in the period from 1550 to 1660. These, it is claimed, began with the Norman conquest, and were influenced by the plagues of the fourteenth century and the consequent reductions in population size and labour force. Increase in the size of estates owned by gentry and aristocracy marked an end to feudalist relations of production, and the further advance of market capitalism. A new set of social priorities was introduced in opposition, by the revolutionary impulses of the Levellers, Puritans and Diggers of the English Civil War being transplanted in radical form to New England. The failure of republicanism and the restoration of the monarchy in England from 1660 began a period of expansion of large landed estates; the rise of the gentry and the legal and economic means by which they could be supported; and conspicuous consumption, particularly building. Deprivations for tenant farmers, and agricultural labourers by whom farms were operated, included poor wages, dreadful living conditions, and lack of education. Much of this information is already known, and presented here as a competent précis with useful summary tables, but a full evaluation of the complexities of the many types of enclosure, for example, over about three hundred years, as well as incorporation of similar areas researched within the field of historical geography, would have required a much longer book. The geographical scales at which the overviews of English and American agricultural history are made mean that the question of substantial regional variation is underplayed, including the influence of soil types.

Part II, ‘Northern Family Farming and the Southern Plantation Complex’, is the strongest section of the work, developing in substantially researched detail the characteristics of each agricultural form and their roles as important components of the identity and position of north and south in the Civil War. Successive chapters address antebellum northern farming, its actors and competence, and what is termed the plantation assault on the southern yeoman. This is done through comparison of selected rural counties, with English Husbandry and non-random criteria for this sample offering potential for debate.

Part III, ‘Agriculture and Sectional Antagonisms’ develops the precept that structural differences between ‘the family farm and the plantation produced a contrast of values. The farm promoted equality, independence, local community, and self-mastery. The plantation evoked the ideas of inequality, a hierarchical order to society, and mastery over others – a repetition of British aristocratic deals’ (p. 183). There is a brief concluding epilogue, and appendices give details of the acreage owned by slaveholders and nonslaveholders (sic), and a list of the counties used as samples in chapter 8.

There are some difficulties of interpretation and illustration. One is a problem of nomenclature, in the implicit assumption that ‘Great Britain’, ‘Britain’, ‘British’, ‘England’ and ‘English’ are interchangeable. For example, ‘The British Gentry’ of the book's title would have fuzzier meaning in Europe where it would normally mean (current geopolitical ambitions apart) England, Wales, Scotland and (more recently) part of Ireland. In chapter 2 we read in succeeding sentences about farm enterprises in ‘Great Britain and the United States’ and that republicanism's failure ‘to take institutional root in England had major results for British agriculture’ (p. 29). The inclusion of some maps would have afforded a greater awareness of spatial differences in landholding and environmental regions, and provided a means of locating places mentioned. The three-stage referencing system, notwithstanding the author's justification (p. xv), remains awkward to handle.

The detailed research on small farms and plantations in this book is of great value. Its general thesis will predictably and deservedly be subject to further debate, partly on the grounds that historiographically its own main critical target is largely a spent force, and partly because different balances of agriculture, industry and urbanisation need to be conceived in more accurate explanations of the make-up of northern and southern ideology and practice and the aggressiveness of the plantation, rather than in what the author terms a ‘David versus Goliath’ contest.