ΙΙ. THE CRITIQUE OF THE ENCLOSURE MOVEMENT, THE NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES OF URBANIZATION, AND THE NECESSITY OF LAND REFORMS

In contrast to other political economists (such as Mill or Cairnes), Leslie held the heretic view that the formation of large-scale capitalist farms in England was not the appropriate solution for English agriculture. He believed that both England and Ireland were burdened with feudalistic property rights, which distorted Britain’s agricultural development. Leslie’s detailed historical analysis provides evidence that yeomanry was important in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that the number of small proprietors decreased during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He pointed out that factual data prove “that the total number of persons now in possession of land is less than it was at the Conquest” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867c, p. 165). For Leslie, the English land is highly concentrated in a few hands, and by criticizing Leone Levi’s (1821–1888) statistics, he noted that “most of the land is really owned by fewer persons than any official enumeration is likely to show” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867c, p. 166). Leslie offers an informative historical narration to illustrate how the Smithian “natural progress of things” was interrupted and replaced by the gradual restoration of medieval (feudal) land property rights. For Leslie, this violation prevented the emergence of a new farming class (small proprietors) and maintained the non-productive class of landlords. The conclusion of his historical examination is explicit: English agriculture requires another Reform Act “to restore the independence and security of its tenant-farmers” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867c, p. 170). Leslie informs us that the condition of agricultural laborers deteriorated during the nineteenth century and provides historical data to illustrate this aggravation:

Moreover, Leslie used William Thomas Thornton’s (1813–1880) descriptions to illustrate the worsening of the social and economic conditions of the agricultural laborer. Leslie’s analysis resembles the Marxian narration of primitive accumulation, as he connects this deterioration with the “enclosure” movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote ⁶ Leslie drew on legal and economic history to sketch the evolution of the Enclosure Acts.Footnote ⁷ According to his politico-economic brochure “The English Land Question, 1870,” the enclosure of common lands was catastrophic to both yeomanry and tenant farmers as these lands constituted “no small part of the villagers’ means of living” and “the loss of them entailed on many of them the further loss of their separate holdings” (Leslie Reference Leslie1870c, p. 210). He regarded this political choice as decisive for the evolution of the English land system. According to Leslie, the enclosure movement destroyed the ancient property rights on common lands and “an immense extent of common pasturage and woodland was withdrawn from the peasant and added to the domain of the great landholders” (Leslie Reference Leslie1870c, p. 211). For him, the enclosure movement implied the restoration of feudal property rights, which were crystallized in landlords’ consolidation of communal farms and wastelands. Following Leslie’s approach, this process has two decisive effects on the evolution of English agriculture: (a) the reduction of leases and (b) rental increases.

Leslie’s economic history stresses the political dimension of wealth’s distribution, since through the process of enclosing communal lands, “seven million acres had been taken from the patrimony of the poor and added to the private property of the rich” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867c, p. 173). He argues that the enclosure movement was the means through which landlords completed “the confiscation of the patrimony of the English peasantry” and “ceased only with the almost complete expulsion of the peasantry from the soil” (Leslie Reference Leslie1870c, pp. 213–214). Leslie shows that enclosures deprived yeomen and tenants of common lands and displaced them from their fields due to limited availability of free land and the subsequent increase in rental rates for arable land.Footnote ⁸ In Leslie’s words (Reference Leslie1870c, p. 215), the “small proprietor, the freehold tenant, the copyholder, and the tenant for years were ejected from their fields as they had been from their commons.” The nineteenth century completed this transformation: “The landed yeomanry are almost gone; the tenant-farmers have lost their ancient independence and interest in the soil; the labourers have lost their separate cottages and plots of ground, and their share in a common fund of land” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867c, p. 174).

In a highly Toynbean vein, Leslie observed that these social and economic conditions led yeomen, tenants, and farm laborers to migrate “from the country to a few great manufacturing towns and the metropolis” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867c, p. 175). For Leslie, migration transformed former small farmers into miserable wage laborers. He used statistical data to illustrate this violent movement from the country to town: In the early 1870s, “no less than 5.153.157 persons … be gathered into seven large towns—London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, and Bristol” (Leslie Reference Leslie1870c, p. 205).

Urbanization increased house rents and aggravated the living conditions of laboring people. Leslie (Reference Leslie1870c, p. 205) noted that this process implied a twofold effect: first, “the wretched and hopeless condition of the agricultural laborer on the one hand,” and, second, “the precarious employment and crowded dwellings of the working-classes in large towns on the other.”Footnote ⁹ He quoted Lord Shaftesbury’s (1801–1885) observations to illustrate the living conditions of town laborers whose “burial and sick clubs are broken up, their reading-rooms destroyed, their social meetings for what is called social improvement are rendered no longer possible, and they are forced into other neighbourhoods where they find none of these comforts” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867c, p. 185).Footnote ¹⁰ Furthermore, Leslie argued that the middle classes face similar difficulties and “are beginning to disappear altogether” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867c, p. 187). Following Maine’s approach, he informs us that the fragmentary movement from the “status to contract” in land property rights was the prima causa “of all pauperism in England” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867c, p. 190). This imperfect movement is crystallized in the fact that “the law of landed property is … the radical cause which makes our jurisprudence a byword in the civilised world and prevents the possibility of reducing it to a simple and intelligible code” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867c, p. 190). This incompleteness is promoted through enactments that suppressed ancient land rights. At the same time, landlords had prevented—through enclosures—the rise of a new class of small peasant landholders. In Mainean terms, the English peasantry lost its ancient connection to the land through a series of enactments that promoted confiscations and encroachments.

This legal, political, and economic process violated the natural tendency of England that “was never, and is less now than ever, towards large farms” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867c, p. 178). According to his analysis, the agricultural products best suited to England’s soil and climate are those of small-scale, meticulous farming. Thus, he believed that the laws and customs of English agriculture were moving against the Smithian “natural course of things” and overturning agricultural development.Footnote ¹¹ According to Leslie, the violation of the English agriculture resulted in an unnatural development of both manufacturing and commerce.

For Leslie, the recovery of the “natural course of things” meant the formation of small proprietorships. He believed that the development of small proprietorships required the demolition of feudal property rights that were restored through the enclosure movement. Leslie, following Mill, pointed out that there are two means to attain this: (a) the first is the institutionalization of the French law “of partition of family property among all children alike,” and (b) the second is the abolition of the law of primogeniture and the “limitation of the amount of land that any single individual shall take by inheritance” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867c, p. 191). His applied political economy shows that reforms in land ownership and cultivation methods would rupture feudalism’s naked and consistent barbarity in all its forms.

ΙΙΙ. LESLIE’S LAND SYSTEMS (1870): A HISTORICAL AND INSTITUTIONALIST CRITIQUE OF BRITISH LAND SYSTEMS

Leslie’s views on the Irish land question are gathered in his (only) treatise, Land Systems and Industrial Economy of Ireland, England, and Continental Countries (1870a). His vehement critique of Irish land property rights, his critical appraisal of large-scale farming, and his fervent conclusions about the efficiency of the system of small proprietorships are all based on the inductive historical-comparative political economy developed in this book. The inductive historical-comparative method helped Leslie perceive the historical and geographical differences among various land systems. In the Introduction of Land Systems, Leslie (Reference Leslie1870a, p. 3) informs us that he collected facts and recorded genuine impressions made on his mind by careful inquiry. His Land Systems illustrates some core perspectives of the economic history of the Irish land system. Leslie traced the historical reasons to answer the famous question of why the English system of landed property, which (partly) succeeded in England, failed (so utterly) in Ireland. Leslie offers the most radical answer to this question. He moved against the dominant view, noting that even in England, the famous tripartite system “proved a most disastrous failure” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867a, p. 12).Footnote ¹²

At this point, Leslie’s position differs from Mill’s. As noted above, Leslie adopted the Millian political economy of small proprietorships (Manioudis Reference Manioudis2024). However, his approach was even more radical. Mill’s motif of the relativity of economic doctrines, as developed in his Principles of Political Economy ([1848] Reference Mill1909), led him to believe that the classical solution of the tripartite system is not a one-size-fits-all model of land use. Mill argued that the tripartite system—of landlord, capitalist farmer, and land laborer—was appropriate in England but not suitable for countries such as India or Ireland (Manioudis and Yiardoglou Reference Manioudis and Yiardoglou2023). Thus, he promoted the institutionalization of small proprietorship in specific circumstances. However, in contrast to Mill’s approach, Leslie believed that small proprietorships are appropriate for both England and Ireland. He described how legislators should reform England’s land system to promote the formation of small proprietorships. According to Leslie’s political economy, the increase in the number of proprietors in land and the security of long leases are of prime importance in promoting small, careful, and productive farming.Footnote ¹³

Leslie prepared his critique of the classical land solution by employing Smith’s economic philosophy. He argued that English economic advancement was a subversion of the “natural progress of opulence” as was promoted by the development of towns and commerce, rather than by agricultural growth. However, as Leslie argued, the development of the Irish economy could not be seated on an unnatural course of economic development, since its towns were not so prosperous as to promote Irish progress toward opulence.Footnote ¹⁴ His inductive/historical analysis led him to contest the deductive conclusions of Ricardian economics about the Irish land question. For instance, his paper “The State of Ireland, 1867” (1867a) is a systematic critique of the view that regarded the increase in Irish wages as a sign of improvement due to emigration. Leslie (Reference Leslie1868b, p. 96) characterized the political economists “who attribute the rise in wages to emigration” as erroneous. His inductivist approach assisted him in noting that “wages are highest in the localities where population, in place of decreasing, has increased” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867a, p. 9).Footnote ¹⁵ For Leslie, this view is rooted in the “imaginary” construction of the wages fund doctrine, which supposes that the share of each laborer has “to become greater as the number sharing becomes smaller” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868a, pp. 40–41). Leslie, together with other political economists such as William Thompson (1775–1833) and J. S. Mill, was one of the most severe critics of the iron law of wages. Leslie’s essay “Political Economy and Emigration” (Reference Leslie1868b)—published in the radical Frazer’s Magazine—is one of the harshest critiques of the wages fund doctrine as was formulated by post-Ricardian economists, such as John Ramsey McCulloch (1789–1864) (Stirati Reference Stirati, Mongiovi and Petri1999).

Leslie moved against the wage fund doctrine explanation and noted that “the bulk of the emigration from Ireland has been the result of a perpetuation of the evils of Ireland instead of a cure for them; … it is a waste of industrial power arising from obstacles to industrial enterprises of every kind in Ireland itself” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868b, p. 95). He attributes the wages’ increase to other economic (and non-economic) factors such as the rise in the price of different commodities “due to the principal monetary phenomena of the twenty years of new gold mines, steam and free trade” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868b, p. 96). According to Leslie (Reference Leslie1868b, p. 96), these factors caused the consequent rise in the price of labor “in all parts of the world, where means of communication with the best markets have been greatly improved.” For Leslie, the Irish prosperity, which post-Ricardian economists observed, is visionary as the twin rise in both Irish wages and prices “has in a great measure neutralised its purchasing power to the labourer” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868b, p. 97). He applied his inductive historical-comparative method to evidence his heretical—as he names it—political economy.Footnote ¹⁶ His analysis ran against the wages fund doctrine as he observed, “Roads, railways, steamers, proximity to the English markets, increased demand in those markets, the influx of gold, the equalisation of prices, and the immigration of money, not the emigration of labour” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868b, p. 98). According to Leslie’s estimations, “wages doubled while the population quadrupled, in little more than a single generation” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868b, p. 102). Thus, the classical view of the positive effects of emigration is a theoretical fallacy that, in addition to being ideologically biased, conceals the deeper roots of the Irish land question. Leslie was explicit: The weaknesses of the Irish land system are rooted in the English land law. He held the view that if there had been in England “a simple jurisprudence relating to land, a law of equal intestate succession, a prohibition of entail, a legal security for tenants’ improvements, an open registration of title and transfer,” then, a considerable number of small proprietorships would emerge (Leslie Reference Leslie1870a, p. 2).

Smith’s and Mill’s influence led Leslie to regard “security” as a principal tenet of his proposals. According to Leslie, the legal security of cultivators is the sine qua non of agricultural improvement (Collison Black Reference Black and Denis2002). For him, the “law of security”—unlike the law of supply and demand—“is the law which has no exceptions” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867d, p. 320). In this vein, the English administration should propose an intermixture of measures to promote (first and foremost) the tenant’s security:

For Leslie, the chief reason for agricultural distress was the “shortness of leases,” which discouraged tenants from promoting permanent improvements in the land. At the same time, “the landlord never made them” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867a, p. 14). For Leslie, the shortness—or the absence—of leases is a mark of insecurity that violates the course of natural agricultural development. He stated that the farming system of Ireland “though defective as regards manuring, rotation of crops, draining, and buildings, is so chiefly for want of security” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867a, p. 27).

Furthermore, Leslie stressed the negative effects of landlords’ absence. He agreed with Mill that a significant weakness of the Irish agriculture was that many property owners were not Irish and, as such, were disassociated from their holdings (Leslie Reference Leslie1868a, pp. 45–46). The direct consequence of their absence was that they were bad farmers and poor improvers of their estates. According to Leslie (Reference Leslie1870b, p. 73), the absenteeism of great landlords was a significant loss for Ireland, and, by echoing Mill again, he points out that landlords were continuously withdrawing immense quantities of productive capital from Ireland. Following the Smithian theory of economic development, he observed that this withdrawal was decisive in the non-development of markets and the backwardness of Irish towns.Footnote ¹⁷

Leslie adopted an institutionalist approach and argued that Ireland’s land system was responsible for its unhealthy and unnatural economy. For him, the backward status of Irish agriculture was the chief reason for the loss “of the numerous local markets which a community flourishing in all the departments of industry would create” (Leslie Reference Leslie1870b, p. 58). Leslie follows the Smithian economic philosophy and concludes that the underdevelopment of the Irish rural economy constrained the growth of both manufactures and trade since the “the town follows the country in ‘the natural order of opulence’” (Leslie Reference Leslie1870b, p. 71).Footnote ¹⁸ He characterizes the Irish land system as feudal reminiscent, which negatively affected the development of other sectors of the economy. His paper “The Irish Land Question, 1870” adopts the Smithian economic philosophy highlighting the fact that the unhealthy status of the Irish rural economy “militates against the prosperity of other employments and classes” (Leslie Reference Leslie1870b, p. 59). Thus, he argued that whatever “evils then follow in the case of the country from insecurity and restraints on industrial energy must be tenfold greater in case of a town” (Leslie Reference Leslie1870b, pp. 59–60).

Furthermore, according to his inductive analysis, the intrinsic problems of the Irish land system were compounded by the lack of necessary infrastructure. This fact illustrates Leslie’s tendency to stress (at various points in his work) the importance of improving roads, constructing railways, and improving ports (see, inter alia, Leslie Reference Leslie1868a, Reference Leslie1870b).Footnote ¹⁹ Leslie’s Irish essays, apart from institutional reforms, stress the necessity of a comprehensive program of public policies to promote economic development. This program includes public works such as drainage, improvements in communications, and methods of cultivation.

In the same vein, Leslie highlighted the role of institutions, emphasizing the critical importance of jurisprudence in shaping economic and social affairs. According to his (Mainean) analysis, various incidents evidence the feudal residues of the English law in Ireland. His institutionalist approach led him to conclude that property rights in land were a significant obstacle to the development of Irish manufactures and commerce. He believed that Irish land property rights were aristocratic residues that promoted landlords’ interests at the expense of society’s welfare. His 1868 essay evidences his antiaristocratic views. Leslie stated that the Irish law of land aimed:

IV. FOLLOWING THE “MILLIAN TRADITION”: THE DOUBLE REJECTION OF CLASSICAL AND FENIAN SOLUTIONS

The (long) period between 1815 and 1870 is the era of the classical landed property reform of the Irish problem. According to this view, the most efficient solution to the Irish land question was the imposition of “the English agricultural system upon Ireland through the consolidation of landholding and by the application of capital to the land” (Koot Reference Koot1987, p. 43). The Irish reactions against the classical economist perspective on Ireland’s landed property reform threatened the union of the British empire (Mansergh Reference Mansergh2022). The need to preserve the Empire’s integrity led both Mill and Leslie to propose small proprietorship as a critical step towards defending the union with Britain. Leslie rejected the classical economist perspective and attacked Robert Lowe (1811–1892), who was—as Gladstone’s chancellor of the exchequer—the chief exponent of it.Footnote ²⁰ Lowe was the leading orator against the Reform Bill of 1867, opposed to all government intervention, and believed that landlord-tenant relations should be placed on a strictly commercial footing (Collison Black Reference Black and Denis1960, Reference Black and Denis2002; Maloney Reference Maloney2005). According to Leslie, post-Ricardian political economists and liberal politicians, such as Lowe, opposed the necessary reforms to Irish land property rights. For him, the classical landed property reform “appeals to the sanctity of the freely drawn-up contract, the inalienable right to property, and the benefits of large-scale capitalist farming” (Moore Reference Moore1995, p. 73). Leslie and Mill’s proposed reforms moved against these views.

Many historians of economic thought (Hodgson Reference Hodgson2001; Maloney Reference Maloney, Vernengo, Caldentey and Ghosh2016; Manioudis Reference Manioudis2021, Reference Manioudis2024) show that Leslie was a self-proclaimed disciple of J. S. Mill. Mill was one of the first political economists to criticize the one-size-fits-all land solution and developed his critique through his close acquaintance with Cairnes (Mineka and Lindley Reference Mineka, Lindley and Mill1972). As is well known, Cairnes wrote extensively on Ireland, and his articles in the Economist were a source for Mill’s own writing on Irish land systems (Boylan and Foley Reference Boylan, Foley, Boylan, Prendergast and Turner2011).Footnote ²¹ Thomas Boylan and Tadhg Foley (Reference Boylan and Foley1983, p. 100) note that Cairnes’s Notes on the State of Ireland (1864) “were used by Mill in the revised edition of his Principles.” Cairnes’s argumentation against Longfield’s position directed Mill’s support towards small proprietorships.Footnote ²² Cairnes’s Essays in Political Economy, Theoretical and Applied (1873) contains a vehement critique of the laissez-faire solution to Irish land and highlights the limitations of political economy when applied to Irish land issues. Mill, being influenced by Cairnes, criticized the classical economist perspective on Irish landed property reform. He believed that this perspective ignored the distinction between movable and immovable property.

Leslie followed this stream and believed that the solution of great estates is based on the utilitarian principle that landlords’ interests are sufficient to secure land improvement and increased production. However, he argued that the “desire of wealth … must impel the possessors of land, like the owners of capital in trade, to make the best commercial and productive use they can of their possessions” (Leslie Reference Leslie1866, p. 124). Leslie (Reference Leslie1866, p. 124) anticipates the Millian critique and notes that the landlord, besides wealth, desires “ease, pleasure, social position, and political power,” which are frequently at odds with the improvement of land and the well-being of society. Thus, he adopted the distinction between movable and immovable property to phrase his views:

Additionally, following Mill ([1870] Reference Mill1875, p. 106), he observed that the consolidation of farms in Ireland, which was promoted by the solution of the tripartite system and “from which so much was expected, and which so many Englishmen still honestly believe to be the panacea of Irish poverty,” was a total failure. According to his applied political economy, the “consolidation of farms, in place of being an advance, has involved a palpable retrogression in Irish husbandry and in its productiveness” (Leslie Reference Leslie1870b, p. 67). Thus, he criticized the classical perspective and, by citing Léonce de Lavergne, he pointed out that “the sweeping conversion of small farmers into laborers is, whether they go or stay, a revolution full of danger to both England and Ireland” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868a, p. 43; my italics). According to Leslie, the capitalist transformation of the Irish rural economy—and the subsequent disappearance of small proprietorships—was the root of Fenian outrages. In his own words: “Fenianism, in its worst form, is the direct result of the suspension of leases, the consolidation of farms, and the emigration to which so many proprietors have looked for the regeneration of Ireland” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868a, p. 44).

Leslie’s paper “Ireland in 1868” (1868a), published in the Fortnightly Review, is supplementary to Mill’s England and Ireland, published in the same year. Like Mill’s pamphlet, Leslie’s paper is a virulent critique of the Fenian outrage and ardently endorses the maintenance of the union. Leslie believed that Fenianism is associated with the American hostility towards English commerce and characterized it as an organized and criminal form that promotes “the dismemberment of the kingdom, civil war, and the dissolution of civil society” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868a, p. 34). For him, Fenianism was a destructive power, and he pointed out that all views that support the separation of Ireland from the British Empire are groundless romantic avowals. Moreover, he characterized as spurious patriotism those views that sought “to avenge the misfortunes of Ireland by the destruction of England” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868a, p. 42). Leslie echoes Mill’s political views and notes that the “inevitable, immediate result of separation would be a furious war of religions and races,” which would promote the involvement of foreign assistance (Leslie Reference Leslie1868a, p. 36). His liberalism led him to be a passionate follower of Smithian and Millian doctrines. In this vein, he pointed out that what is especially desirable for Ireland is a closer union with England, since the “greatest of all calamities from which the Irish people suffered for centuries was not connection with England, but compulsory isolation, politically, socially, and commercially” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868a, p. 36).

Leslie’s historical investigation shows that the specimens of economic progress in various parts of the island in 1868 originated from the “closer connection with England” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868a, p. 38). Following his preliminary economic geography:

According to Leslie’s inductive analysis, the economy of Ireland presents an unequal development across its provinces, since the “true economic line of division in Ireland between advancement and stagnation was never between north and south, or between Ulster and other provinces, but between east and west, between the English and the Irish side of the island” (Leslie [1880] Reference Leslie1881, p. 137).

For Leslie (Reference Leslie1868a, p. 34), it is “English markets, English manufacturing towns, and English wealth that enable the Irish farmer to eke out in any way the scale of wages on the eastern side.” For him, this notification is illustrated by the fact that, in contrast to the “wages fund doctrine,” it “is the English market for Irish commodities, not the American market for Irish labour, that raises wages in Ireland” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868a, p. 41). He argued that tenants of Ireland who “have suffered the more through history” had been those “who are still farthest from England and its markets” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868a, p. 46).Footnote ²³ Leslie’s conclusions echo Mill’s views as he states that “there is no source from which improvement can come to the stagnant and retrogressive quarters of Ireland save from English connexion and English legislation” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868a, p. 47).

V. THE BIRTH OF IRISH HISTORICAL ECONOMICS? SMALL PROPRIETORSHIP AND THE ROLE OF THE STATE

Leslie rejected Lowe’s proposal and criticized, as Cairnes had done, the laissez-faire solution of the landlord-tenant relationship. In 1866, he pointed out that “the sole duty of the State is to enforce the performance of contract” (Leslie Reference Leslie1866, p. 117).Footnote ²⁴ His rejection is rooted in his historical exploration, which shows that Lowe ignored the evolution of Irish land property rights. Leslie pointed out that the absenteeism—the frequent absence of all improvement by the landlord—and the refusal to provide any security to the tenant had been significant obstacles originating from the landlord’s non-productive behavior. His inductive analysis led him to note that the tenant’s insecurity resulted in high rents, which were “not what political economists define it, the surplus above average wages and profit” but “the surplus above minimum wages, without any profit at all” (Leslie Reference Leslie1866, p. 128). According to Leslie, the sole solution to the Irish land problem lies in transferring (great) lands from nobles to citizens through the transformation of property rights and the advancement by the English Treasury of a “few millions to enable Irish tenants to purchase their holdings” (Leslie Reference Leslie1870b, p. 82).Footnote ²⁵ Thus, not surprisingly, he was disappointed by Gladstone’s Land Acts and believed that the state has to secure the movement from the “status to contract” and promote the attainment of the “natural progress of opulence” in Smithian terms.

Leslie’s political economy highlights the state’s interventionist framework. He argued that measures such as the prohibition of entails, the transfer of land by simple registration and at the least cost, the security of tenure, and the sale of absentee lands to the tenants are critical preconditions for Ireland’s economic development. Leslie’s conclusion in his “The Irish Land Question, 1870” echoes Mill’s views as phrased in his England and Ireland: “The great aim of Parliament ought to be to diffuse property in land widely throughout the nation; treating all immediate cost incurred for that end in compensating existing proprietors as incurred, not only for the improvement of Ireland, but also for the security of the Empire” (Leslie Reference Leslie1870b, p. 84).

According to Leslie’s political economy, the state should promote the diffusion of landed property. He pointed out that “the best security the public can obtain for the good management of land is the personal interest of its private holders” (Leslie Reference Leslie1866, pp. 123–124). For Leslie, when tenants cannot obtain the (necessary) security from their contracts with landlords, the state should intervene and guarantee it. He believed that the state’s interference to promote security “is in perfect accordance with the true meaning of the maxim of laissez-faire ,” namely, the ability of any person to manage his business as he thinks best (Leslie Reference Leslie1866, p. 128). As has already been indicated, Leslie regarded insecurity as the prima causa of Irish agricultural backwardness. He assumed that insecurity activates the unproductive tendencies of Irish agriculture and affects both manufacturing and commerce. His 1867 pamphlet presents the historical investigation of insecurity in Irish land history. Leslie used the famous Report of the Devon Commission (1845) to illustrate that insecurity was a structural feature of Irish agricultural history (Leslie Reference Leslie1866, Reference Leslie1867b).Footnote ²⁶

For Leslie, lengthening the leases, which Mill and Thornton also support, is of prime importance in providing security for tenants. He believed that the state should ensure the lengthening. He noted that the lengthening has “the double advantage of disposing the tenant to improve his farm as a whole by all the means in his power … and of recompensing him without the intervention of any external authority, or the risk of dispute with his landlord” (Leslie Reference Leslie1866, p. 130). For Leslie, any objection about the state’s intervention has a twofold origin: first, landlords, who are not disposed to abandon an inch of their absolute control over the land; and, second, the ambivalence of legislators to promote a radical solution. The policy implication of his political economy is explicit: The Irish Question is the simple question”of giving equal and popular laws to the Irish people” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868c, p. 155).

For Leslie, as for Mill, the essence of the Irish land question is an issue of power. As such, he observed that “until the code regulating the ownership, tenure, transfer, and inheritance of land becomes an equal one, regarding the poor as much the rich, the tenant as much as the landlord, the Irish question will never be solved” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868c, pp. 155–156).Footnote ²⁷ His conclusion, as phrased in his 1870 “The English Land Question,” is illustrative of the political character of the land question in England and Ireland: “The day is not distant when the supreme question of English, as of Irish politics, will be whether the national territory is to be the source of power and luxury to a few individuals, or of prosperity and happiness to the nation at large? and whether those few individuals or the nation at large are to determine the answer?” (Leslie Reference Leslie1870c, p. 229). Leslie regarded the state’s intervention as a necessary precondition to provide the final solution to the Irish problem. His call for active state intervention is linked to his belief that, during the 1880s, various factors tended to expand the government’s role. His last essay echoes the radical view that legislation should “shape the laws in conformity with the welfare of the inert and unorganized mass of society” (Leslie [1880] Reference Leslie1881, p. 137).

Of course, Leslie acknowledged the material improvement of Ireland after the famine years and conceded that the Land Act of 1870 ameliorated the Irish tenant’s condition in terms of his food habits, his clothing, and his housing, while the “development of banks, the custom of dealing with them, the ability to give better security than formerly, are all good in themselves” (Leslie [1880] Reference Leslie1881, p. 139). However, he observed that the Irish legislation continued to favor (great) landlords and noted that the English land system in Ireland “yields no profit, but only rent and scanty wages for indolent and unskillful labor” (Leslie [1880] Reference Leslie1881, p. 140). According to his analysis, the Land Act of 1870, promoted by John Bright (1811–1889), did not address the hard core of the Irish land question: the necessary transformation of land property rights. Leslie’s critique, as is phrased in his 1880 essay, echoes the spirit of his Land Systems but, at the same time, is economically and politically updated. He noted that the problem with the Land and Tenant Act of 1870 was, “Instead of boldly creating a great number of small proprietors with full ownership, it aimed at giving tenants indiscriminately an indefinite interest in the holdings, thereby causing much uncertainty and litigation, and satisfying neither landlord nor tenant” (Leslie [1880] Reference Leslie1881, p. 142).

Leslie’s historical, geographical, and ethological analysis led him to conclude that the formation of small proprietorships is the ideal solution to the Irish problem. The pillar of his 1880 essay is the promotion of small proprietorships. In his own words, the best system “economically and socially, is one that admits of properties of different sizes, allowing the small owner to rise, developing various types of life, and giving room for experiments in cultivation, of which only large owners are capable” (Leslie [1880] Reference Leslie1881, pp. 140–141). In his 1880 essay, Leslie discussed the plan for the optional commutation of rents into land annuities, grounded in his belief in free trade doctrines (Collison Black Reference Black and Denis2002).Footnote ²⁸ However, due to the political instability in Ireland, he concludes that the state must purchase landlords’ farms and grant them to tenants. Once again, Leslie follows Mill’s thinking and argues that the creation of small peasant holdings would confront the Fenian outrages and secure social coherence, political stability, and economic advancement.Footnote ²⁹ He pointed out that the fixity of tenure, fair rents, long leases, and free transferability of land would secure small and efficient cultivation and solve economic regression and Irish emigration. Again, Leslie follows the Smithian philosophy and notes that the development of agriculture promotes the progress of both manufacturing and commerce.

Thus, according to Leslie, the key solution to the Irish land problem is the formation of small proprietorships. Collison Black (Reference Black and Denis2002) and Manioudis (Reference Manioudis2024) show that Leslie’s inductive surveys evidence his view that the institution of small proprietorships is an effective mode of tillage in most European states. His political economy of small proprietorships is historically and spatially specific and is appropriate for the “old Europe,” as he called it. In his own words: “what is far more important—the peasantry of England and Flanders, demonstrates that it would have been well, not only for the peasantry, but for the landlords of the former, had the rural population never been converted wholesale, as it has been, into labourers for hire (Leslie Reference Leslie1867d, p. 337).

Leslie believed that the formation of small proprietorship would be an”engine of economic development." His view is seated on Mill’s political economy of small proprietorship, according to which:

For Leslie, small proprietorships were suitable for the European continent’s geology, physiology, and climate. His political economy of small proprietorships is shaped by the Smithian theory of economic development, which stresses the importance of agriculture in promoting manufacturing and trade, and by the Millian political economy of small proprietorships, according to which the productivity of small estates is (frequently) higher than that of grande culture . Furthermore, Leslie adopted (and extended) Smith’s view that the small proprietor is, of all improvers of land, “the most industrious, the most intelligent, and the most successful” (Smith [1776] Reference Smith1904, p. 390). Furthermore, he adopted Mill’s critique of the law of primogeniture and entails as institutions that prevented the formation of small proprietorships. Mill ([1870] Reference Mill1875, p. 101) endorsed Leslie’s views and pointed out that the small proprietor (or the tenant) is the most efficient land improver.Footnote ³⁰

Leslie’s political economy of small proprietorships unified Smith’s and Mill’s views and promoted the perspective that the formation of small proprietorships would promote Ireland’s agricultural improvement and help the Irish economy to outreach its economic stagnancy, since the great bulk of people “is dependent on agriculture, and must furnish the consumption upon which home trade depends” (Leslie 1867a, p. 30). Leslie enriched his views by citing Arthur Young (1741–1820) and Jean Charles Leonard de Sismondi (1773–1842) and noting that the tenant’s interest is tightly associated with the improvement of his land. Thus, short leases and high rents prevent the Irish farmer from investing “his savings and leisure anywhere rather than upon the permanent improvement of his farm” (Leslie Reference Leslie1866, p. 126). Leslie stressed the critical importance of long and secure leases, citing De Laveleye’s descriptions of Flanders (Leslie Reference Leslie1867b, pp. 144–145).

For Leslie, the limitation of small proprietorships reduced the volume of agricultural production. He noted that the extension of pasturage in Ireland during the 1860s and 1870s was a sign of economic and social retrogression and was tightly connected with the violent reduction of small proprietorships, rendering them, as both Mill and Cairnes observe, unimportant.Footnote ³¹ According to Leslie’s theory of economic development, retrogression is possible since the production of grazing farms substituted tillage.Footnote ³² He believed Irish agriculture was moving against the natural course of things and stated that there “is hardly any part of Europe, save England, better fitted for farms of the smallest description than the greater part of Ireland” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867a, p. 18). According to Leslie’s empirical analysis, in the province of Belgium—which experienced high agricultural productivity during the late nineteenth century—“on rich and poor soils alike, wherever large and small farms meet in competition the former are beaten” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867a, p. 19).Footnote ³³ Thus, he called on Ireland’s landlords to “introduce the art of spade husbandry [e.g., small proprietorship] into the island with triumphant success, and make five-acre holding more productive in many parts of it, even the barrenest, than large farms” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867a, p. 23).

As a result, the legislation must ensure that the tenant is protected regarding his cultivation. For Leslie, the institution of small proprietorship is an effective means of promoting a viable association between the tenant and his land. He adopted Mill’s descriptions of the “productive value of the affectionate interest in the land which the Continental peasant feels” and pointed out that this value could be secured by the state’s intervention towards the formation of intensely cultivated small holdings (Leslie Reference Leslie1867b, p. 140).Footnote ³⁴ Thus, he believed that legislation should intervene to ensure the lengthening of leases and the free transferability of land. According to his approach, this intervention requires structural institutional reforms, including, among others, the abolition of the laws of primogeniture. Leslie was critical of the feudal institutions of both primogeniture and entails.Footnote ³⁵ Thus, he criticized political economists who deny the state’s intervention regarding the formation of small proprietorships: “Those who deny the right of the law to interfere in any case between landlord and tenant, forget that the history of the law of tenure is the history of successive interpositions to give security to the tenant. … The doctrine of non-interference applies only to the production of commodities under free competition” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867a, p. 27; my italics).

He proposed the fourfold classification of Irish lands and remarked, in a truly Millian vein, that legislation and education “may assist la petite culture if directly it cannot” (Leslie Reference Leslie1867a, p. 26).Footnote ³⁶ Like Mill, he adopted Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt’s (1767–1835) views and regarded education as the prime catalyst of social and economic transformations. According to Leslie, the formation of small proprietorships promotes the diffusion of knowledge (Manioudis and Yiardoglou Reference Manioudis and Yiardoglou2023). He noted that careful farming is a positive check of population’s increase and cites Nassau Senior’s (1790–1864) views. Senior pointed out that through small proprietorships, tenants will regulate their numbers so as not to subdivide holdings into “portions minuter than those which will maintain a family in the comforts which the habits of the people require” (Leslie Reference Leslie1868c, p. 156).Footnote ³⁷ Additionally, following Mill’s views, he stated that the proprietary interest influences the character of the tenant, making him more provident, industrious, and active (Leslie Reference Leslie1867b, p. 143). This conclusion is the direct result of Leslie’s theory of structure, which emphasizes the role of institutions in shaping human character. At the same time, it also highlights Leslie’s original belief in social reform.

Leslie’s critical appraisal of the Irish land problem reflects his broader grievances against the one-size-fits-all Ricardian political economy (Koot Reference Koot1975; Lipkes Reference Lipkes and Lipkes1999; Manioudis Reference Manioudis2024). His historicist and institutionalist critique reflects a thorough and systematic examination of history, law, and geography, closely associated with the “relativity of economic doctrines” scheme, which became a central pillar of the Irish historical school. Leslie used his applied political economy to criticize the abstract nature of the classical economist perspective on landed-property reform and illustrate the peculiarities of the Irish agricultural situation. The Irish land question gave rise to Irish historical economics and allowed Leslie to become, as various scholars note (inter alia, Koot Reference Koot1987; Coleman Reference Coleman1987; Hodgson Reference Hodgson2001; Milonakis and Fine Reference Milonakis and Fine2009; Backhouse Reference Backhouse, Boylan, Prendergast and Turner2011; Manioudis Reference Manioudis2024), one of the founders of the British historical school.