An account of the course and development of the Irish Land War itself is provided in this chapter. It examines the political and social role of the Land League alongside its particular diagnoses of Ireland’s economic and political malaise. The role of radical language, particularly discussion of the right to life and self-preservation, on Land League platforms is analysed. This is looked at in conjunction with the responses to the varying solutions to the Land question, such as peasant proprietorship and the ‘Three F’s’, as well as Gladstone’s 1881 Land Act. Labourers, both rural and urban, and their relationship to the Land League are considered. Finally, the chapter assesses the implications of the different forms of collective resistance to the institutions of landed proprietorship in Ireland, particularly boycotting, and considers these as examples of political ideals in action. It argues that such practices reinforced the same principles as those expressed discursively.

Chapter 5 argues that preoccupation with travel, topography, and geography merely formed the basis for even more ambitious projects that did, however, show the limits of what practical patriotism might achieve. When combined with a providential belief in the potential of the land, the application of geographical and botanical knowledge to the countryside meant that spaces which had hitherto been considered ‘empty’ or ‘wild’ could be filled with new meaning. Reformers were concerned with the role of people (Indians, but also Europeans, Africans, and Caribbeans of African descent, as well as enslaved people) in managing landscapes. They increasingly discussed questions of what we might call ‘biopower’ after Foucault, conceiving of labour and the management of the population as a resource. In this, reformers paid particular attention to the possibility that humans might influence environments in more profound ways than just by building roads. They hoped that human errors that had made Caribbean environments ‘unhealthy’ in the past could be reversed by building better-ventilated settlements, or regulating military barracks to help soldiers behave like agricultural settlers and make this land productive.