The War Over Rent

Historian and data scientist Jo Guldi shares the David and Goliath story of the nineteenth-century Irish Land War, showing how a small band of revolutionary peasants took on the British Empire—and won.

The War Over Rent is a sweeping story of the groundbreaking struggle between the Irish and the British that transformed how we view housing today. After more than a decade of research, Jo Guldi draws on previously unused archival material, including an extraordinary range of maps, historical surveys, and court records, to unearth stories of ordinary citizens doing extraordinary work.

From evicted tenants to journalists, insurgents to judges, and politicians to statisticians, the Irish united to protest perpetually escalating rent. The movement experimented with every available weapon: high-stakes assassinations, secret societies, dynamite plots. But ultimately, nonviolent activism—including rent strikes, investigative journalism, parliamentary politics, and grassroots data analysis—allowed them to find previously inconceivable success. The 1881 Irish Land Act became the world’s first modern rent-control law, offering a model for land redistribution and mortgage programs that still echoes around the world.

The forgotten experiments of these early data activists raise the question: How can we harness data as an instrument for democratic revolution today? And in the face of global housing crises and growing wealth disparity, is there a way to repeat the success of the Land War? One part gripping, under-told history, one part recipe for agitation, The War Over Rent is breathtaking in its implications.