The endurance of entail: feudalism, political economy, and land reform in late eighteenth-century Britain

Speaker: Tom Pye (UCL)

Between 1760 and 1830, Scotland experienced a brutal and intense transformation of its agricultural economy, characterised by cycles of estate consolidation, tenant dispossession, and rural depopulation across both its Lowland and Highland areas. This paper interrogates the relationship between this economic transition and Scotland’s feudal legal system. We typically understand Scots land law as a principal target of Scotland’s ‘improver’ class of unionist lawyers and landowners: it shielded property from capital more effectively than English common law, which was why some called for Scots law to be Anglicised. But the endurance of the Scottish entail across the period tells a different story. A type of feudal land grant that kept land in families and out of the hands of creditors, the entail was defended by unionists in the 1760s as a critical part of the credit-based economy that structured imperial Britain. In 1770, the Westminster parliament reformed them, while keeping their fundamental architecture intact. Recovering the terms in which the Scottish entail was debated, justified, and authorised casts new light on the histories of unionism and political economy in eighteenth-century Britain. It also builds on the recent historiography of capitalism in the British Atlantic world.

IHR Seminar Series: British History in the Long 18th Century