McGeachy analyses the impact of political, social and economic changes in Argyll from 1730 to 1850 on the common people's culture and traditional way of life. He also details the patterns of popular resistance which emerged to the agricultural improvements and to the Highland Clearances.

This heavily illustrated and innovative study is founded upon personal documents, town council minutes, legal cases, inventories, travellers' tales, plans and drawings relating to some 30 Scots burghs of the Georgian period. It establishes a distinctive a

"Matthew P. Dziennik has written a compelling account of the Scottish Highland soldier and his service in Great Britain's American colonies during the French and Indian War and America's Revolutionary War. In the middle to the late decades of the eighteenth century, the British state recruited more than twelve thousand soldiers from the Highlands of Scotland for the purpose of expanding and defending Britain's American empire, thereby transforming the most maligned region of the British Isles into a key sustainer of British imperialism. Dziennik's fascinating history corrects the mythologized image of the Highland soldier as a noble savage, a primitive if courageous relic of clanship, revealing instead how the Gaels used their military service to further their own interests in terms of material security and social status. Using both English and Gaelic sources, the author re-creates the experiences and the mindset of the Highland soldier in the New World and demonstrates in the process how a periphery of the British Isles became a center of the British Empire." -- [Tiré de la jaquette].

There has been much academic interest in the role of museums as places where understanding of the past is shaped and legitimised for a wide and increasingly diverse public. This book focuses on the museum representations of the Highland Clearances - a much neglected aspect of one of the most disputed and politically-charged issues in modern Scottish history. Drawing together a range of inter-disciplinary themes and notions, it considers the cultural legacy of the period, brings to light the socially and historically conditioned meanings and values encapsulated in museum narratives of the Clearances, and shows the significance of collective memory in the negotiations inherent in heritage work. Examining both national and local museums in Scotland and concluding with comparisons with Australian museums of migration, Dynamics of Heritage contributes to our understanding of the processes of heritage construction, and its relationship to issues of memory and other modes of engagement with the past.

Badenoch today is a landscape of empty glens and ruined settlements, but it was not always so. This book examines the transformative events that shaped the region's destiny: climate and market forces, hunger and relief measures, sheep farms and sporting estates, agricultural improvement and proprietorial greed, and the evolution of clanship. Although this is an intensely localised study, the dramatic nature of change is explored against the wider context of events not just across the Highlands, but also within the British state and its global empire. Badenoch's journey moves from the relative prosperity of the Napoleonic Wars into the terrible post-war destitution that devastated peasant, tacksman and Duke of Gordon alike. Estate reform and 'improvement' gradually brought a degree of economic and social stability, but inevitably resulted in depopulation as people were forced off the land to seek refuge in the impoverished 'planned villages' or to abandon their Gaelic homeland for life in the Lowlands. For those with the means, however, emigration provided lucrative opportunities unimaginable at home. Through extensive use of documentary evidence, much of it previously unseen, David Taylor paints an intimate portrait of the historically neglected region of Badenoch – one that provides a compelling new perspective on Highland history.

Hugh Graham lived from the start of the 20th century to the start of the 21st, in the sea-girt Highland Parish of North Knapdale in Argyll, Scotland. Great changes occurred in his lifetime, and the centuries before – changes in land use and culture that saddened him, even angered him, but he had ever the serenity and pragmatism of the West Highlander – the Gael. In this place the Irish Gaels arrived over 1,500 years ago, establishing the proto-Scottish nation, in a green place amidst the ancient grey crags, with the blessing of the monks in the holy island of Iona on Argyll’s North-Western edge. Amidst the craggy hills and raised lochs of Knapdale, and prehistoric standing stones and burial mounds of wide Kilmartin Glen, and old chapels on the long peninsulas reaching into the Hebridean Sea, and the ruins of villages in the now-sheep-cropped glens, lived Hugh Graham and his ancestors.

This book examines the structures and texture of rural social relationships, using one type of document found in abundance over all the four component parts of Britain and Ireland: petitions from tenants to their landlords. The book offers unexpected angles on many aspects of society and economy on estates in the 17th and 18th centuries.

This book tells the fascinating story of Badenoch, a forgotten region in accounts of Scottish history. Situated in the heart of the Highlands and with its own distinct historic and geographic identity, Badenoch was in the throes of dramatic change in the post-Culloden decades. This ground-breaking study reveals some radical differences from trends across the rest of the Highlands. Foremost was the role of the indigenous entrepreneurial tacksmen in driving the rapidly growing commercial economy as cattle graziers, drovers and agricultural improvers, inevitably provoking confrontation with the absentee and ostentatious Dukes of Gordon. Meanwhile, the common people still operated within a subsistence farming economy heavily dependent on a surprisingly sophisticated use of their mountain environment. Though suffering great hardship, they too were quick to exploit any potential commercial opportunities. Economic forces, social ambition and post-Culloden legislation created intolerable pressures within the old clan hierarchy, as Duke, tacksman and erstwhile clansman tried to forge their individual - and often irreconcilable - destinies in a rapidly changing world. In doing so, all were increasingly drawn into the wider, and often lucrative, dimensions of British state and empire.

A battle lost. A daring escape. A long walk into obscurity. The ultimate failure.... In the aftermath of the disastrous Battle of Culloden, a lonely figure takes flight with a small band of companions through the islands and mountains of the Hebrides. His name is Charles Edward Stuart: better known today as Bonnie Prince Charlie. He had come to the country to take the throne. Now he is leaving in exile and abject defeat. In prose that is by turns poetic, comic, macabre, haunting and humane, multi- award-winning author Alan Warner traces the frantic last journey through Scotland of a man who history will come to define for his failure. 'Written in carefully crafted prose shot through with cleverly-deployed alliteration and assonance, this reimagining of Charles Edward Stuart's escape from Culloden is a triumph' – Stuart Kelly, The Scotsman

In 1830, the little Hebridean island of Lismore was one of the granaries of the West Highlands, with every possible scrap of land producing bere barley or oats. The population had reached its peak of 1500, but by 1910, numbers had dwindled to 400 and were still falling. The agricultural economy had been almost completely transformed to support sheep and cattle, with ploughland replaced by the now familiar green grassy landscape. With reference to documentary sources, including Poor Law reports, the report of the Napier Commission into the condition crofters in the Highlands and Islands, as well as local documents and letters, this book documents a century of emigration, migration and clearance and paints an intimate portrait of the island community during a period of profound change. At the same time, it also celebrates the achievements of the many tenants who grasped the opportunities involved in agricultural improvement.