Irish Land War

The Irish Land War was an agrarian campaign from 1879 to 1882 against landlord power and insecure tenancy. It combined rent strikes, boycotts, political organizing, and demands for land reform.

Irish National Land League: An Irish political organization founded in 1879 to secure fair rents, fixed tenure, and free sale for tenant farmers. It coordinated tenant agitation and gave the Land War a national organization.
Irish Famine of 1879: A severe food crisis in western Ireland in 1879, caused by poor harvests and worsened by poverty and insecure land tenure. The crisis helped trigger the renewed agitation that became the Land War.
Michael Davitt: An Irish nationalist and social reformer who founded the Irish National Land League with Charles Stewart Parnell in 1879. Davitt linked tenant demands to a broader campaign against landlordism.
Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881: A British law that established fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale for many Irish tenants. It enacted key demands raised by the Land League and Land War.
Boycotting: The organized refusal to deal with a person or business as a form of social or economic pressure. The campaign made social isolation a weapon against evictions and landlord agents.
Irish tenant farming: A system in which Irish farmers rented land from landlords, often under insecure agreements and at rents they disputed. Tenant dependence on landlords supplied the central grievance.
Charles Stewart Parnell: An Irish nationalist politician who led the Home Rule movement and became president of the Irish National Land League. Parnell brought parliamentary influence and national visibility to land agitation.
Kilmainham Treaty: An 1882 agreement between Charles Stewart Parnell and the British government that helped end the Land War and secure tenant relief. It marked a political settlement after leaders were released from prison.
Captain Charles Boycott: An English land agent in County Mayo whose isolation by local tenants in 1880 gave the word “boycott” its name. The treatment of Boycott became the campaign’s most famous example of collective pressure.
Irish absentee landlordism: Landownership in Ireland by landlords who lived mainly outside the estates from which they drew rents. Absentee ownership sharpened the conflict over who controlled land and its income.

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