Sara L. Maurer. The Dispossessed State: Narratives of Ownership in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. ISBN: 9781421403274. Price: US$60.00/£31.50

Underpinning Sara L. Maurer’s The Dispossessed State is the notion that it is possible to trace, over the course of the nineteenth century, a significant shift in British thinking about property rights. While acknowledging that property continued to be a source of heated debate throughout the century, Maurer argues that by the end of the nineteenth century the belief that property pre-existed the law had been largely replaced by the belief that property was constituted by the law. Having established this thesis in her Introduction, Maurer proceeds, in the body of the book, to explore the extent to which, and ways in which, these two ways of thinking about property affected a century of Irish and British fiction, journalism, and political theory. Novelists are well represented in Maurer’s study, which discusses works by Maria Edgeworth, Anthony Trollope, George Moore, and George Meredith. Less space and attention is given to political and economic theorists: one chapter is devoted to John Stuart Mill’s conception of property, as demonstrated in his writings on Ireland, and one section of a chapter, on the Irish Land Acts of 1870 and 1881, to the ideas of Henry Sumner Maine and William Gladstone. As suggested by this brief overview, Ireland is assigned a key role in the property debates featured in The Dispossessed State. Nineteenth-century Irish nationalists, Maurer reminds us, “framed the Irish experience as one of having had rights to the land, of having been robbed of them by the British state, and of still experiencing them, nonetheless, as a palpable attachment” (8-9). At a time when rights of property in Britain were increasingly portrayed as being authorized by the state and its legal apparatus, she goes on to argue, a notion of property rights that could not be erased by mere legalities appealed to many British citizens. The first chapter of the book is concerned with property rights in Maria Edgeworth’s fictional writings. For Edgeworth, we are told, property was a right that pre-existed law and the state. In Edgeworth’s Irish novels, however, the notion of an attachment to the soil that cannot be severed by legal means is as relevant to the Anglo-Irish as it is to the so-called native Irish. Indeed, this extra-legal attachment is shown to unite these two groupings. In Edgeworth’s final Irish novel, Ormond, this attachment and the unity it facilitates is placed under threat by increasing state involvement in Ireland. In Chapter 2, Maurer provides an overview and analysis of John Stuart Mill’s vision of property, suggesting that Mill not only believed that the state in the abstract had the power to create rights in property, but that, through the redistribution of land, it should begin to exercise such power in Ireland. In chapters 1 and 2, therefore, Maurer offers us two contrasting concepts of property and its relationship to law and the state. Chapter 3 discusses the appeal that Irish assertions of a “native attachment to the land” (122) had for those in Britain who were caught between such opposing visions of property. The chapter concludes with an examination of the aforementioned Irish Land Acts, arguing that, through the supposed restoration of indigenous property practices to the Irish, the Acts established a form of dual ownership that neither set a precedent for state interference with English property nor posed a threat to British rule in Ireland: “The Irish might own the land in their own way, and the British might go on controlling the same land in theirs” (131). The fourth chapter of the book maintains that Anthony Trollope drew on the Irish Land Acts in …