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This ambitious project surveys the massive changes the 20th century has brought to Scotland. The nation's leading commentators give an overview of the most important trends, providing new insights and fresh perspectives. Comparative reference to other societies in the UK and Europe highlight the unique elements of Scotland's distinctive development. Home Rule issues, the discovery of oil, deindustrialisation, public housing, education, landownership, the role of women, social class, and many more areas of Scottish life are assessed and explored in this rich, rewarding and comprehensive study.
This is a collection of fifteen essays written over the last twenty years by one of Scotland's most eminent historians. The material concentrates on four broad themes in seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish history: Merchants, Unions and Trade; Scottish Economic Development; The Highlands; and the Rural Lowlands.
For more than a century and a half the real story of Scotlands connections to transatlantic slavery has been lost to history and shrouded in myth. There was even denial that the Scots unlike the English had any significant involvement in slavery .Scotland saw itself as a pioneering abolitionist nation untainted by a slavery past.This book is the first detailed attempt to challenge these beliefs.Written by the foremost scholars in the field , with findings based on sustained archival research, the volume systematically peels away the mythology and radically revises the traditional picture.In doing so the contributors come to a number of surprising conclusions. Topics covered include national ...
The Great Hunger in nineteenth-century Ireland was a major human tragedy of modern times. Almost a million perished and a further two million emigrated in the wake of potato blight and economic collapse. Acute famine also gripped the Scottish Highlands at the same time, causing misery, hardship and distress. The story of that lesser known human disaster is told in this prize-winning and internationally acclaimed book. The author describes the classic themes of highland and Scottish history, including the clearances, landlordism, crofting life, emigration and migration in a subtle and intricate reconstruction based on a wide range of sources. This book should appeal to all those with an interest in Scottish history, the emigration of Scottish people and the Highland Clearances.
T. M. Devine uses extensive original research to examine Scotland's urban vigor as well as describing the traditional aspects of Scottish history, covering key topics such as the Union, the Enlightenment, Industrialization, the Clearances, Religion, and the Road to Devolution. He also explores the global Diaspora of the Scots, the impact of migrants, and the effect of the World Wars. Throughout, Scotland's story is set against the background of British, European, and world history.
This is a history of Scotland as a society experiencing industrialization and urbanization in all its aspects and it takes the impact of these processes over their widest range from croft, bothy and hunting lodge to mines, foundries, and urban poor houses. The volumes create an awareness of the identity and distinctiveness of Scotland and recognize it as a multi-cultured society, the highland and lowland cultures being only the major ones among several.
'A superb book ... Anybody interested in Scottish history needs to read it' Andrew Marr, Sunday Times Eighteenth-century Scotland is famed for generating many of the enlightened ideas which helped to shape the modern world. But there was in the same period another side to the history of the nation. Many of Scotland's people were subjected to coercive and sometimes violent change, as traditional ways of life were overturned by the 'rational' exploitation of land use. The Scottish Clearances is a superb and highly original account of this sometimes terrible process, which changed the Lowland countryside forever, as it also did, more infamously, the old society of the Highlands. Based on a vast...
'The Scottish Nation, 1700-2007' examines the social, political, religious and economic factors that have shaped modern Scotland. Devine places Scotland firmly within an international context and provides a key focus for the ongoing debate regarding Scotland's future.
In the later decades of the 17th century, Scotland was a relatively poor and undeveloped country. Around 100 years later it was in the throes of an extraordicnary transformation, which laid the basis for the nation's world economic pre-eminence in the Victorian era. Two aspects of this great leap forward, the Industrial Revolution and the Highland Clearances have been much studied. This is a study of a fundamental development, of the transition from peasant to capitalist agriculture. It covers the social change in Scotland through a wide range of issues including agrarian economy, evolution of tenant farming and landlordism.
The Irish were the single largest group of immigrants to Scotland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the original settlers and their descendants have had a major impact on modern Scottish society, culture and politics. This book of original studies is the first major reassessment of the general effect of Irish immigration on Scotland since the classic works of James Handley during the 1940s. All the contributors have produced significant research in the field, and the book provides a varied and balanced insight into current historical thinking on the Irish in Scotland.