By 1782, Anglo-Irish politician Henry Grattan noted that absentee Irish landlords earned approximately £800,000 per annum, and he attempted to place an extra tax on remittances paid out to these landowners.
However, many absentees landlords also reinvested part of their rents into roads and bridges, to improve local economies, that are still seen today.
A notable beneficial absentee in the 19th century was Lord Palmerston, who went into debt to develop his part of Sligo; an investment that eventually paid off.
[citation needed] By the 1800s, resentment grew as not only were the absentee landlords Protestant (while most tenants were Catholic and forbidden to inherit land), but their existence meant that the goods produced in Ireland were primarily exported.
This system became particularly detrimental to the Irish public during the Great Famine when, despite Ireland being a net exporter of food, millions starved, died of disease, or emigrated.
An absentee landlord crisis was a key factor in Prince Edward Island's decision to become a part of Canada when the idea of Confederation was proposed in 1867.
At the Charlottetown Conference, delegates proposed a fund to purchase landlords' holdings if the Island joined Confederation.
Under the terms of union, Canada agreed to provide the Island with an $800 000 fund to purchase the remaining absentee holdings.
[6] in 1875, the Land Purchase Act was enacted to force owners of the large estates to sell their holdings to the provincial government.
[9] The changing of this law (the change occurring at the same time as the freeing of the Africans in the United States and in South America and the emancipation of the serfs in Russia (held in slavery by the Russian landowning class) was a part of the worldwide 19th-century movement towards emancipation and civil rights for oppressed minorities.
[8][10] At the same time the area witnessed an increased flow of Jewish immigrants who did not restrict themselves to the cities where their concentration offered some protection from persecution.
Organizations created to aid the Jewish migration to Palestine also bought land from absentee landowners.