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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.
The author of On the Other Side of Sorrow gives a detailed account of the causes and effects of the Scottish potato famine that began in 1846. When Scotland’s 1846 potato crop was wiped out by blight, the country was plunged into crisis. In the Hebrides and the West Highlands, a huge relief effort came too late to prevent starvation and death. Farther east, meanwhile, towns and villages from Aberdeen to Wick and Thurso protested the cost of the oatmeal that replaced potatoes as the people’s basic foodstuff. Oatmeal’s soaring price was blamed on the export of grain by farmers and landlords cashing in on even higher prices elsewhere. As a bitter winter gripped and families feared a repeat of the calamitous famine then ravaging Ireland, grain carts were seized, ships boarded, harbors blockaded, a jail forced open, and the military confronted. The army fired on one set of rioters. Savage sentences were imposed on others. But crowds of thousands also gained key concessions. Above all they won cheaper food. Those dramatic events have long been ignored or forgotten. Now, in James Hunter, they have their historian. The story he tells is, by turns, moving, anger-making, and inspiring. In an era of food banks and growing poverty, it is also very timely. Praise for Insurrection “Hunter never forgets that history is first of all narrative—and this book is rich in stories—or that is subject is the experience of individual men and women, creatures of flesh and blood, not abstractions. Insurrection is fascinating reading, both painful and uplifting.” —Allan Massie, the Scotsman (UK)
This book examines the climatic and economic origins of the last national famine to occur in Scotland, the nature and extent of the crisis which ensued, and what the impact of the famine was upon the population in demographic, economic and social terms. Current published knowledge about the causes, extent, and impact of the famine in Scotland is limited and many conclusions have been speculative in the absence of extensive research. Despite the critical importance of this crisis, one of the four disasters of the 1690s, which are widely acknowledged to have contributed to the economic arguments in favour of the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, the topic has been largely neglected and even underplayed by historians. This is the first full study of the famine, providing a unique scholarly examination of the causes, course, characteristics and consequences of the crisis. A comprehensive study of agricultural, climatic, economic, social and demographic issues, the book seeks to establish answers to the fundamental question concerning the event. How serious was it? Using detailed statistical and qualitative analysis, it discusses the regional factors that defined the famine, the impact on the population, and the interconnected causes of this traumatic event.
During a Biblical seven years in the middle of the nineteenth century, Ireland experienced the worst disaster a nation could suffer. Fully a quarter of its citizens either perished from starvation or emigrated, with so many dying en route that it was said, "you can walk dry shod to America on their bodies." In this grand, sweeping narrative, Ireland''s best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, gives a fresh and comprehensive account of one of the darkest chapters in world history, arguing that Britain was in large part responsible for the extent of the national tragedy, and in fact engineered the food shortage in one of the earliest cases of ethnic cleansing. So strong was anti-Irish sentiment in the mainland that the English parliament referred to the famine as "God's lesson." Drawing on recently uncovered sources, and with the sharp eye of a seasoned historian, Coogan delivers fresh insights into the famine's causes, recounts its unspeakable events, and delves into the legacy of the "famine mentality" that followed immigrants across the Atlantic to the shores of the United States and had lasting effects on the population left behind. This is a broad, magisterial history of a tragedy that shook the nineteenth century and still impacts the worldwide Irish diaspora of nearly 80 million people today.
'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 array of original sources, this pioneering book is the first to chart this tumultuous saga in one volume, with due attention to evictions and loss of land in both north and south of the Highland line. In the process, old myths are exploded and familiar assumptions undermined. With many fascinating details and the sense of an epic human story, The Scottish Clearances is an evocative memorial to all whose lives were irreparably changed in the interests of economic efficiency. This is a story of forced clearance, of the destruction of entire communities and of large-scale emigration. Some winners were able to adapt and exploit the new opportunities, but there were also others who lost everything. The clearances created the landscape of Scotland today, but it came at a huge price.
This book, originally published in 1988, examines the Highlands and Islands of Scotland over several centuries and charts their cultural transformation from a separate region into one where the processes of anglicisation have largely succeeded. It analyses the many aspects of change including the policies of successive governments, the decline of the Gaelic language, the depressing of much of the population into peasantry and the clearances.
The Irish famine of the 1840s is the biggest humanitarian crisis in the United Kingdom's history. Within six years of the arrival of the potato blight in Ireland in 1845, more than a quarter of its residents had unexpectedly died or emigrated. Its population has not yet fully recovered since. Historians have struggled to explain why the British government decided to shut down its centrally organised relief efforts in 1847, long before the famine ended. Some have blamed the laissez-faire attitudes of the time for an inadequate response by the British government; others have alleged purposeful neglect and genocide. In contrast, this book uncovers a hidden narrative of the crisis, which links policy failure in Ireland to financial and political instability in Great Britain. More important than a laissez-faire ideology in hindering relief efforts for Ireland were the British government's lack of a Parliamentary majority from 1846, the financial crises of 1847, and a battle of ideas over monetary policy between proponents and opponents of financial orthodoxy. The high death toll in Ireland resulted from the British government's plans for intervention going awry, rather than being prematurely cancelled because of laissez-faire. This book is essential reading for scholars, students and anyone interested in Anglo-Irish relations, the history of financial crises, and why humanitarian-relief efforts can go wrong even with good intentions.
In the century before the great famine of the late 1840s, the Irish people, and the poor especially, became increasingly dependent on the potato for their food. So when potato blight struck, causing the tubers to rot in the ground, they suffered a grievous loss. Thus began a catastrophe in which approximately one million people lost their lives and many more left Ireland for North America, changing the country forever. During and after this terrible human crisis, the British government was bitterly accused of not averting the disaster or offering enough aid. Some even believed that the Whig government's policies were tantamount to genocide against the Irish population. James Donnelly's account looks closely at the political and social consequences of the great Irish potato famine and explores the way that natural disasters and government responses to them can alter the destiny of nations.
Received to wide acclaim when first published in the 1990s, this absorbing book remains one of the most important, influential and widely read histories of the Scottish Highlands from the end of the Jacobite Risings to the great crofters' rebellion of the 1880s. T. M. Devine argues that the Highlands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the wholesale transformation of a society at a pace without parallel anywhere else in western Europe. This is an important book for all those interested in the history of the Scottish Highlands and Islands, and for students and scholars of Scottish history, social history and rural society.
The tragedy of the Clearances, brought about by cynical, often absentee landlords, is a black page in Scotland's history. Written while the effects it describes were still unfolding, Mackenzie's history brings the distress before the reader.