Importance as impetus or impediment? The case of 19th century chartered surveyors.

Definitions and theories professions and professionalization have long been tailored on a set of professions established in England during the 19^th century. Chartered surveyors belong in that group, but have not received the attention afforded to other members of the core set – notably medicine, law, theology, and engineering. This paper argues, however, that chartered surveyors present an interesting deviant case in the history of professionalization, on account of their peculiar links to state and market. The argument proceeds in two steps. In a first section, we show how chartered surveyors have entered the profession literature, and how their early emergence is explained in these accounts. Next we focus on a hitherto neglected aspect of that emergence: the peculiar importance of a subset of those tasks that were within chartered surveyors’ jurisdictional turf. We show that chartered surveyors were endowed with the task of determining house values, and how this linked the professional group to the state both (a) via taxation and the control of the local government tax-base and (b) via the electoral system in the period from 1867 to 1918.