Urban Development in England and America in the Nineteenth Century: Some Comparisons and Contrasts
T THERE is considerable historical precedent-as well as intellectual justification-for some comparative study of the ownership and development of land as it affected urban growth on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century. From the i830s to the i86os, radicals like Bright had constantly invoked the example of the United States when attacking the monopoly of rural land in England,2 by pointing to the different structure of landownership in America, and the absence of primogeniture and entail, resulting from the reforms begun by Jefferson in Virginia at the time of the Revolution, which were subsequently imitated by most other states.3 So when, in the I 88os, the attack on the aristocratic monopoly of land in England shifted its emphasis from the rural to the urban context, the transatlantic arguments and analogies were deployed once more. The American free trader Edward Atkinson, writing in the Westminster Review of I 889, looked at the land problems of the United Kingdom-