Urban Development in England and America in the Nineteenth Century: Some Comparisons and Contrasts.

The article compares the urban development in England and the United States in the nineteenth century. From the 1830s to the 1860s, radicals had constantly invoked the example of the United States when attacking the monopoly of rural land in England, by pointing to the different structure of landownership in the U.S. The working of the markets in English and American urban land, and the assumptions about the importance of the land law in bringing about the differences between them unconsciously echo the shared ground of the nineteenth-century arguments about leaseholds, and embody what might be termed the present historical consensus on the subject. One purpose of this article is to suggest that the importance and consequences of different land law have also been overrated for urban land, and that the late nineteenth-century conservatives, who like their mid-Victorian predecessors had argued that social forces were more powerful than legislation, did indeed have the better of the argument. But in addition, it will also suggest that the constant contrast between a freehold urban U.S. and a leasehold urban England ignores some very real elements of similarity which existed between the English and American markets in urban land.