First published in 2006. This book contributes towards a more just appreciation of the relative importance of the different major social groups in the life of the country. It deals in the main with the economic history of the landed interest, and with its role as a social group and includes much agrarian and some industrial history as seen from the landowners' point of view. The first seven chapters of the book aim to present an analysis and description of the main elements in the institutions and way of life of the landed classes, suggesting their significance for society at large, and emphasizing the forces of change which were at work within an order which in many ways presented a remarkably stable appearance to the outside world. The last five chapters take up the theme of change and examine the dynamic elements in the economic social and political life of the group, in a sequence of chronological subdivisions of the century and a half with which this book is concerned.

First published in 2006. This book is based on research into estate records and studies around the three broad categories of landowners: peers, gentry, and freeholders. Landed property was the foundation of eighteenth-century society. The soil itself yielded the nation its sustenance and most of its raw materials, and provided the population with its most extensive means of employment; and the owners of the soil derived from its consequence and wealth the right to govern.

This book sets out to test the traditional view that for centuries English landed society has been open to new families made rich by business or public office.

Using a neo-Marxian perspective, Benno Engels examines the absence of urban planning in nineteenth-century England. In his analysis of urbanization in England, Engels considers the influences of property owners, inheritance laws, local government structures, fiscal crises of the local and central state, shifts in voter sentiments, fluctuating economic conditions, and class-based pressure group activity.

The extent to which the Great War impacted upon English landed society is most vividly recalled in the loss of young heirs to ancient estates. English Landed Society in the Great War considers the impact of the war on these estates. Using the archives of Country Life, Edward Bujak examines the landed estate that flourished in England. In doing so, he explores the extent to which the wartime state penetrated into the heartlands of the landed aristocracy and gentry, and the corrosive effects that the progressive and systematic militarization of the countryside had on the authority of the squire. The book demonstrates how the commitment of landowners to the defence of an England of home and beauty - an image also adopted in wartime propaganda - ironically led to its transformation. By using the landed estate to examine the transition from Edwardian England to modern Britain, English Landed Society in the Great War provides a unique lens through which to consider the First World War and its impact on English society.

Eileen Spring presents a fresh interpretation of the history of inheritance among the English gentry and aristocracy. In a work that recasts both the history of real property law and the history of the family, she finds that one of the principal and determinative features of upper-class real property inheritance was the exclusion of females. This exclusion was accomplished by a series of legal devices designed to nullify the common-law rules of inheritance under which--had they prevailed--40 percent of English land would have been inherited or held by women. Current ideas of family development portray female inheritance as increasing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but Spring argues that this is a misperception, resulting from an incomplete consideration of the common-law rules. Female rights actually declined, reaching their nadir in the eighteenth century. Spring shows that there was a centuries-long conflict between male and female heirs, a conflict that has not been adequately recognized until now.