Scottish Highlands and the Atlantic World - (Histories of the Scottish Atlantic) by S Karly Kehoe & Chris Dalglish & Annie Tindley (Paperback)

About the Book

Reveals the importance of social networks and identities to defining Highland Scots' engagements with Empire and its lasting legacies

Book Synopsis

This is a book about the social in Highland entanglements with Empire - the networks, relationships and identities that made it possible for Highland Scots to access the Empire and its benefits. It explores - from a range of perspectives - the impact that these Scots had, as sojourners and settlers, on the different places they encountered. It is also a book about the present-day legacies of their engagements with Empire, and of the ongoing process of forging social and cultural identities with Highland roots.
The volume presents rigorous and insightful new research from both well-established and early career scholars, accompanied by commentary on the research and the issues it raises from a range of academic and non-academic voices. The book represents a significant contribution our understanding of the role of Highland Scots, influenced significantly by their culture and language, in creating the Empire and its legacies. It advances knowledge of just how diverse the impacts of Highland Scots were on forging landscapes and lifescapes across the Atlantic, and how their exposure to the colonial world influenced and reshaped their Diasporic identities. While the British Empire was a collaboration of diverse interests, this book will shed light on one important interest: the Highland one.

Review Quotes

Scottish Highlands and the Atlantic World is an admirable and important contribution to a growing body of work on the transatlantic connections between Scotland and the Americas, particularly those concerning the Highlands. The outsize Scottish participation in the British Atlantic system is now well-documented, and the Highlands in particular have been the subject of much recent scrutiny. The present study deepens our understanding of this participation, building on recent historiography that seeks to revise an earlier picture of Highlanders as helpless victims of dispossession and displacement.--Kenneth McNeil, Eastern Connecticut State University "Eighteenth-Century Scotland"

This important volume illustrates the complex entanglements between power, identity and belonging embedded in multiple historical social networks informing the Scottish Highlands' uneasy relationship with the Atlantic World. Its thematic focus on land, language and networks of (dis)empowerment is an invaluable contribution to contemporary policy discourses in Scotland and elsewhere.--Calum MacLeod, Sustainable Development Consultant and Policy Analyst