Author: Karen J. Cullen
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 074864184X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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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.
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.
Author: Cormac Ó Gráda
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691122373
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
History.
Author: Harriet Cornell
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1837650489
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
Showcases the latest research on Scotland's rural economy and society. Early modern Scotland was predominantly rural. Agriculture was the main occupation of most people at the time, so what happened in the countryside was crucial: economically, socially and culturally. The essays collected here focus on the years between around 1500 and 1750. This period, although before the main era of agricultural "improvement" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was nevertheless far from static in terms of agrarian development. Specific topics addressed include everyday farming practices; investment; landlords, tenants and estate management; and the cultural context within which agriculture was "imagined". The disastrous famine of 1622-23 is analysed in detail. The volume is completed by a comprehensive survey of recent historiography, setting agricultural history in its broader context.
Author: Ian McPhee
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1838591486
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
At the start of the1700s the life of Scottish clansmen was settled compared to the past. This book describes how Clan families lived simple lives in primitive homes. The Battle of Culloden in 1746 changed Scotland forever. Clansmen were now subject to English justice, prohibited from wearing traditional clothing and carrying weapons. Clan chiefs morphed into hard-nosed landlords and ordinary clansmen faced a different and difficult future, with challenges never experienced by their forefathers. Land reform and the introduction of sheep displaced Gaelic Scots, who had to either live elsewhere, become crofters or emigrate. The development of crofting communities dependant on growing potatoes, and the lives of the people who lived in them, is an essential part of this book. While focused on Mull and Iona, it is a fascinating story about the hardship that tenants experienced throughout Scotland. Disease that decimated potato crops in 1846, caused famine, starvation and great poverty. People lost their livelihoods and were evicted from their homes. Evictions, starvation and government policy led to an upsurge in emigration. Until economic conditions improved during the Crimean War, emigration played a key role in the salvation of a starving population.
Author: T. M. Devine
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141985941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382
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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.
Author: Richard W. Hoyle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317031997
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375
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Book Description
Farmers held a pivotal role in the capitalist agriculture that emerged in England in the eighteenth century, yet they have attracted little attention from rural historians. Farmers made agriculture happen. They brought together the capital and the technical and management skills which allowed food to be produced. It was they - and not landowners - who employed and supervised labour. They accepted the risk inherent in agriculture, paying largely fixed rents out of fluctuating and uncertain incomes. They are the rural equivalent of the small businessman with his own firm, employing people and producing for markets, sometimes distant ones. Our ignorance of the farmer might be justified by the claim that they are ill-documented, but in fact farmers were normally literate and kept records - day books, journals, accounts. This volume goes some way to counter the claim that a history of the farmer cannot be written by showing the range of materials available and the diversity of approaches which can be employed to study the activities and actions of individual farmers from the sixteenth century onwards. Farm records offer invaluable insights into the farming economy which are available nowhere else. In this volume accounts are used in a variety of ways - as the means to access single farms, but also in gross, as a national sample of accounts, to reveal regional variation over time. For the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries the range of sources available increases enormously and farmers - indeed farmer's wives too - emerge as articulate commentators on their own position, using correspondence to outline their difficulties in the First World War. Some even developed second careers as newspaper columnists and journalists. This book focuses attention back on the farmer and, it is hoped, will help to restore farmers to their rightful position in history as rural entrepreneurs.
Author: T C Smout
Publisher: British Academy
ISBN: 9780197263303
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
In 1603, England and Scotland came together and Great Britain was created. But how did this union last when so many others in Europe have failed? This volume provides an account of two nations who have often differed, remained very distinct and yet have achieved endurance in European terms.
Author: Frankie Boyle
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
ISBN: 1800180152
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 57
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Book Description
Where and who do we want to be? How might we get there? What might happen if we stay on our current course? In The Future of British Politics, comedian Frankie Boyle takes a characteristically acerbic look at some of the forces that will be key in coming years, from Scottish independence and post-colonial entitlement to big tech surveillance and the looming climate catastrophe. Despite his fears that 'soon the only red tape in this country will be across the finish line of the compulsory Food Bank Olympics', he manages to locate some hopeful signs amid the gloom, reminding us that 'despair is a moment that pretends to be permanent'. This brief but mighty book is one of five that comprise the first set of FUTURES essays. Each standalone book presents the author's original vision of a singular aspect of the future which inspires in them hope or reticence, optimism or fear. Read individually, these essays will inform, entertain and challenge. Together, they form a picture of what might lie ahead, and ask the reader to imagine how we might make the transition from here to there, from now to then.
Author: T. M. Devine
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199563691
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 720
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Book Description
A landmark study which reconsiders in fresh and illuminating ways the classic themes of the nation's history since the sixteenth century, as well as a number of new topics which are only now receiving detailed attention. Places the Scottish experience firmly in an international historical experience.
