The Great Highland Famine

The Great Highland Famine PDF Author: Tom M. Devine
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
ISBN: 1788854101
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
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 Great Highland Famine

The Great Highland Famine PDF Author: Tom M. Devine
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
ISBN: 1788854101
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Insurrection

Insurrection PDF Author: James Hunter
Publisher: Birlinn
ISBN: 1788852311
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
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)

Famine in Scotland - the 'Ill Years' of the 1690s

Famine in Scotland - the 'Ill Years' of the 1690s PDF Author: Karen J. Cullen
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 074864184X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
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.

The Scottish Clearances

The Scottish Clearances PDF Author: T. M. Devine
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141985941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
'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.

The Famine Plot

The Famine Plot PDF Author: Tim Pat Coogan
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1137045175
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
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.

The History of the Highland Clearances

The History of the Highland Clearances PDF Author: Alexander Mackenzie
Publisher: Mercat Press Books
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
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.

The Highland Clearances

The Highland Clearances PDF Author: Eric Richards
Publisher: Birlinn
ISBN: 0857905244
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
The Highland Clearances stands out as one of the most emotive chapters in the history of Scotland. This book traces the origins of the Clearances from the eighteenth century to their culmination in the crofting legislation of the 1880s. In considering both the terrible suffering of the Highland people as well as the stark choices that faced landowners during a period of rapid economic change, it shows how the Clearances were one of many 'attempted' solutions to the problem of how to maintain a population on marginal and infertile land, and were, in fact, part of a wider European movement of rural depopulation. In drawing attention away from the mythology to the hard facts of what actually happened, The Highland Clearances offers a balanced analysis of events which created a terrible scar on the Highland and Gaelic imagination.

The Great Hunger

The Great Hunger PDF Author: Cecil Woodham-Smith
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 9780140145151
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
The Irish potato famine of the 1840s, perhaps the most appalling event of the Victorian era, killed over a million people and drove as many more to emigrate to America. It may not have been the result of deliberate government policy, yet British ‘obtuseness, short-sightedness and ignorance’ – and stubborn commitment to laissez-faire ‘solutions’ – largely caused the disaster and prevented any serious efforts to relieve suffering. The continuing impact on Anglo-Irish relations was incalculable, the immediate human cost almost inconceivable. In this vivid and disturbing book Cecil Woodham-Smith provides the definitive account. ‘A moving and terrible book. It combines great literary power with great learning. It explains much in modern Ireland – and in modern America’ D.W. Brogan.

Famine in European History

Famine in European History PDF Author: Guido Alfani
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107179939
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
The first systematic study of famine in all parts of Europe from the Middle Ages to present. It compares the characteristics, consequences and causes of famine in regional case studies by leading experts to form a comprehensive picture of when and why food security across the continent became a critical issue.

Set Adrift Upon the World

Set Adrift Upon the World PDF Author: James Hunter
Publisher: Birlinn Ltd
ISBN: 0857902628
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Winner of Saltire Scottish History Book of the Year They would be better dead, they said, than set adrift upon the world. But set adrift they were - thousands of them, their communities destroyed, their homes demolished and burned. Such were the Sutherland Clearances, an extraordinary episode, involving the deliberate depopulation of much of a Scottish county. What was done in the course of that episode was planned and carried out by a small group of men and one woman. Most of those involved wrote a great deal about their actions, intentions and feelings, and much of it has been preserved. There are no equivalent collections of material from those whose communities ceased to exist. Their feelings and fears are harder to access, but they are by no means irrecoverable. In this book James Hunter tells the story of the Sutherland Clearances. His researches took him to archives in Scotland, England and Canada, to the now deserted straths of Sutherland, to the frozen shores of Hudson Bay. The result is a gripping, moving, definitive account of a people's struggle for survival in the face of tragedy and disaster which includes experiences which have not featured in any previous such account.