Soon after Prince Edward Island was transferred from French to British sovereignty in 1763, virtually the entire land surface was turned over to private proprietors on the understanding that they would finance both settlement and the administration of the territory. While the proprietors did not fulfil their obligations, they clung tenanciously to their privileges, ultimately becoming an anachronistic group of landlords on a North American continent where freehold tenure was the norm. J.M. Bumsted goes beyond the previous "heroes" (residents) and "villains" (landlords) approach of much of Island historiography by demonstrating the intimate interweaving of the issues of land, politics, and settlement.

In contrast to most previous works on the subject, this is not a local or regional history, but a book in colonial and/or imperial history which focuses on Prince Edward Island. This broader perspective allows Bumsted to show, for example, that the decision to distribute land to proprietors was a comprehensible and even liberal move by British government in the context of the imperial expansion of the 1760s. Bumsted demonstrates that the external influence of the American Revolution is more important than had been thought, both in isolating the island from Britain and, through the handling of Loyalist immigrants, in exacerbating the conflicts over land ownership.

Previously, Prince Edward Island's crucial formative period from 1763 to the end of the eighteenth century has not received sufficient attention, while the proprietorial system has received too much attention without sufficient critical analysis. Land, Settlement, and Politics on Eighteenth-Century Prince Edward Island redresses the balance.