Andrew C. Holman and Robert B. Kristofferson (eds), More of a Man: Diaries of a Scottish Craftsman...

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September 3, 2014 Time: 05:06pm jshs.2014.0122.tex

BOOK REVIEWS

Siobhan Talbott, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, 1560–1713,Perspectives in Economic and Social History 28 (London and New York:Pickering and Chatto, 2014. Pp. 256. Hardback 978-1-8489-3407-8, £60.00).DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2014.0122

This book studies Franco-Scottish commercial interaction during a time that waschiefly marked by repeated government attempts at prohibiting or limiting these tradesto a minimum level (1560–1713). In this way it yields a number of new insights.The methodology chosen is defined by negation; by the expressive refusal of thetraditionalist quantitative-statistical focus that has dominated commercial histories inthe past five decades or so. What is chosen as a methodology instead is not explicatedbut comes across passim and clearly throughout the text: the study of commercialfluctuations based on private or semi-private documents and the adoption of a moresocial or bottom-up view. This is because ‘statistical sources are rarely complete, andwhen a run of material does exist, entries are not uniform, with the information givendiffering from year to year, month to month, or even entry to entry’ (p. 5). Therefore‘much of the activity that contributed to the development of international commercewas conducted beyond the gaze of port officials, making calculating volumes of tradeor identifying the goods that were traded problematic’ (p. 5).

In the first chapter a convincing case is made that the Auld Alliance formedbetween the two nations towards the end of the thirteenth century remained wellin place, even beyond 1707. Scots merchants continued, over the early modernperiod, to benefit from preferential treatment, such as lower customs rates in Frenchports. French officials did not discriminate between Protestant and Catholic; whatcounted was Scottish nationality. Scots men and women flourished within Frenchsociety and economy, up to the point of complete absorption as full members ofthe local community without ever needing formal letters of naturalisation. Chaptertwo on ‘Markets and Merchants’ argues that ‘trade is habitually viewed as a nationalphenomenon’ and that in order to ‘understand how trade was conducted and thus howeconomies interacted and developed in the early modern period it is vital to considerfully the roles played by merchants and their networks’ (p. 35), a point that is welltaken. Private accounts, letter books and documents relating to individual merchants’transactions are considered and fairly random examples are cited, mainly of transfers ofprivate wealth classifying as luxury goods, to prove that trade continued at all times,even during war. Naturally, such goods do not appear in official customs accounts.

Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 34.2, 2014, 237–268© Edinburgh University Press 2014www.euppublishing.com/jshs

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Chapter three examines the institutional framework of customs legislation, tariffs andprotection; stressing the immensely complex and often contradictory and ambiguousnature of early modern customs legislation, as well as the numerous ways developedby merchants in terms of either evading it or utilising this complex-ambiguous web ofregulation to their very own benefit. As the author aptly formulates, ‘major legislationsuch as the Navigation Acts has been assumed to have been implemented fully, butthis was not the case, due in part to merchant influence and in part to governmentalawareness of the importance of domestic economic stability’ (p. 71). Clandestinechannels were sought instead; false passes and the neutral status of Swedish skipperswere used in turn. Chapters four to six provide interesting case studies of Scottishcommerce during times of conflict marked by the Civil Wars and the Interregnum(1639–60), Franco-Stuart conflict (1627–67) and the War of the Spanish Succession.Empirical evidence is provided that some trade usually continued between Scotlandand France even at times when official legislation either forbade or made it formallydifficult.

In this way the book considerably enriches our understanding of early modernFranco-Scottish commerce by putting living flesh on to the dead bones of thesterile quantitative picture provided by contemporary customs accounts and tradestatistics. It challenges received wisdom in many ways, and whilst the issue is verymuch open to interpretation and opinion – and the book a welcome addition to agrowing number of studies re-evaluating the commercial acumen of early modernScots, it raises a number of important points for further consideration. First, whilst thebook devotes considerable space and attention to how merchants handled trade, evenevoking Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ (p. 51), that is private vices achieving maximumsocietal outcome or Pareto-optimality spontaneously (which modern research onpolitical economy has identified as fallacious; both the idea as such, as well as theassumption that Smith was a ‘market-liberal’ in the way many a ‘neo-con’ wouldhave loved him to be), the reasons why trade between Scotland and France took placein the first instance are not explored. Secondly, the evidence presented especially inchapters four to seven of trade ‘flourishing’, contrary to previous assumptions, duringtimes of crisis rests on quite arbitrary choices of examples mainly regarding privatetransfers of wealth. This is very different from what most economists would defineas exports and imports in terms of the epistemology of modern national incomeaccounting, Ricardian comparative advantage and Heckscher-Ohlinian differentialfactor endowment as ‘economic’ reasons for trade. The latter are, evidently, usefullycaptured in contemporary trade statistics and custom house papers, however muchthey are biased by errors relating to precision, detail and evasion. More attentionshould in further studies also be paid to the larger Scottish ports such as Leith.Pictures derived from chance observations of trade that was going on with Francethrough ports such as Aberdeen or Dumbarton without weighing this against otherports, or against reliable evidence of movements over time or ports across the wholeof Scotland, especially by completely leaving out Leith – Scotland’s biggest and mostimportant port of the age – leaves the painting rich but unfinished. Some figures arepresented which are drawn from the very ‘etatist’ sources identified as problematicalin the introduction, i.e. customs accounts and port records (i.e. figure 4.1 and

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table 5.1) with the aim of supporting the thesis that trade was healthier than previouslyassumed. As most historians are aware, the number of ships calling or sailing out froma particular port does not provide reliable evidence as to either the volume or valueof this particular port’s trade, or the contribution made to business profits and thecountry’s economic well-being. If the ship carries coal and salt it will carry a fractionof the commercial value compared to a ship that is laden with silk, muslins and Frenchwines.

But these are only minor caveats to be redressed in future research into a topicfor which the present book has nicely paved the way, because the book has a point:contrary to many previous accounts there was more trade going on between Scotlandand France than we used to assume. The book will also be a welcome starting pointfor historians sceptical of the uses of etatist documents and statistical analysis, whichis, as historians should be aware, by no means the only valid method of studying earlymodern commerce.

Philipp Robinson Rössner (Universities of Manchester and Leipzig)

Jeffrey Stephen, Defending the Revolution: The Church of Scotland, 1689–1716(Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Pp. 348. Hardback ISBN 978-1-4094-0134-6, £75.00).DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2014.0123

The re-establishment of presbyterianism in 1690 was a turning point in Scotland’sreligious and political life, and yet few historians have studied the post-revolutionChurch in depth. Jeffrey Stephen’s new book sets out to remedy the dearth of basicanalysis, with a largely chronological account of the Kirk’s activities and concernsfrom the revolution to the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1715. Stephen proposeslittle by way of an overarching argument, and the significance of his title is strangelyunexplored. But Defending the Revolution is a generally reliable guide to the religiouspolitics of a critical period.

The introduction briefly surveys James VII’s reign, to set the scene for the events ofthe revolution. Stephen is less convincing here than in later chapters: he confuses theking’s suspending and dispensing powers; erroneously suggests that a mere ‘handful’of presbyterian ministers accepted indulgences under Charles II; and asserts withoutevidence that presbyterian nonconformity was as vigorous in the 1680s as in thepreceding decades. In the period from 1688, however, Stephen is more sure ofthe source material. Chapter 1 is a thorough narrative of the events of 1688–90.Stephen charts the construction by presbyterians of a Church able to rival, andthen to supersede, the episcopalian establishment. But he also gives a good sense ofthe uncertainty surrounding the Church settlement in the period from July 1689,when episcopacy was abolished, to June 1690, when presbyterianism was settled.Chapter two recognises the continuing ideological force of the National Covenant(1638) and the Solemn League and Covenant (1643) in Scottish religious politics after1689. Stephen then summarises debates about the ‘intrinsic right’ of the Church tosummon and adjourn the general assembly, which was contested by the crown, andprovides a useful overview of the powers of each court in the presbyterian hierarchy.

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In chapter three, Stephen discusses the assembly’s commissions for the north and southof Scotland. These bodies were tasked with investigating episcopalian ministers whoremained in post in the 1690s, depriving them of their churches or admitting them topresbyterian ministerial communion. Stephen is keen to defend the commissions’actions from contemporary allegations of anti-episcopalian bigotry; readers mightwonder whether this is a worthwhile objective for a historian in the twenty-firstcentury. Some of Stephen’s strongest analysis occurs later in chapter three, when heconsiders the lobbying by presbyterian courts of the Scottish parliament. The relationsbetween presbyterian clergy and parliament become an increasingly important themein chapters four and five, which focus on the period after the union. Stephen providesa detailed account of the political manoeuvres leading in 1712 to legislation grantingtoleration for loyal episcopalian ministers and restoring lay patronage. In chapterfive, Stephen examines anxieties about Jacobitism, the controversy over the status ofScottish peers at Westminster, and the discontent engendered by the imposition of themalt tax in 1713. As British parliamentary politics moves to the centre of his narrative,Stephen has less to say about attitudes in Scotland, and tends to supplement, ratherthan to modify, existing interpretations of the period. In chapter six, however, Stephenpresents a more innovative discussion of presbyterian ‘home and foreign mission’.Though this section would have benefited from a longer explanation of the ‘post-millenial’ theology motivating missionary activity, Stephen offers an interesting surveyof attempts to proselytise the Highlands, Darien and the American colonies.

For the most part, the book is clearly written. But Stephen tends to paraphrase hisprimary sources rather closely, sometimes retaining archaic expressions and ambiguousphrasing, which can pose challenges for the reader. Students coming to the topicfor the first time might wonder what a ‘pro re nata assembly’ and an ‘exauctoratebishop’ were. Moreover, non-specialist readers probably need to be advised of theparticular perspectives from which such figures as the Jacobite third earl of Balcarresor the discontented presbyterian James Hog wrote. Stephen cites very little literaturepublished since 2007, and even when he engages with arguments advanced by recentscholars he fails to acknowledge their contributions. This approach is discourteous,and underlines the book’s most obvious weakness: its reluctance to consider currentdevelopments in Scottish religious history. Recent work has explored blasphemyand heterodoxy, piety and worship, the ideologies of toleration and uniformity andthe religious dimensions of Scotland’s relations with England and Europe. ThoughStephen mentions some of these themes, his scarce historiographical discussions focuson such outdated works as Drummond and Bulloch’s The Scottish Church, 1688–1843(1973).

Not for the first time when reviewing an Ashgate book, I was struck by thenumber of minor errors in the text. The work of a commission was ‘immanent’,the general assembly repeatedly published its Principle Acts, Patrick Hume of Polwarthand someone called ‘Polworth’ appear in consecutive sentences. Argyll and ‘Argyle’likewise jostle for position. Was a copy-editor involved in the production, and wasthe author allowed sufficient time to check his proofs? The eccentric index omitsmany of the personal names mentioned in the text. These are minor faults, butare disappointing in a work costing £75. Nevertheless, if Defending the Revolution

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will not greatly alter the way we think about the post-revolution Church, itwill serve as a useful point of reference for students of the period’s key politicalevents.

Alasdair Raffe (University of Edinburgh)

Éamonn Ó Ciardha and Micheál Ó Siochrú (eds), The Plantation of Ulster. Ideologyand Practice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Pp. xiii + 269.Hardback ISBN 9780719086083, £70.00).DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2014.0124

This is an important book covering one of the defining moments in Irish and BritishHistory. The two editors are well-known figures in Irish History and they have bothproduced significant and influential publications on early modern Irish History todate. The book itself is the first publication in a new series in Studies in Early ModernIrish History for which Manchester University Press is to be commended. This in turnraises the question of why there are no current series in Early Modern Scottish Historyby academic publishers.

The articles in this book are based on two conferences held in 2009 at Goldsmiths,University of London, the University of Ulster and Trinity College Dublin markingthe 400th anniversary of the Plantation of Ulster. There are 13 articles in total,including an introductory article by the editors. An interdisciplinary approach isadopted and five of the articles are concerned with poetry and literature. AndrewHadfield’s article on ‘Educating the colonial mind: Spenser and the Plantation’ isparticularly interesting on the informative and educational influences that contributedto the development of Edmund Spenser’s colonial mentality to Ireland, especially inhis infamous A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596). Close links are identified withthe writings of Sir John Davies too, most notably his A discouerie of the true causes ofwhy Ireland was neuer entirely subdued, nor brought vnder obedience of the crowne of England,vntill the beginning of his Maiesties happie raigne (1612). Hadfield asserts that in order tofully understand tracts such as these ‘it is necessary to look at the education systemin English universities and grammar schools. The colonisation of Ireland had begun,if not on the playing fields of Eton, then in the classrooms of England’ (p. 164).In this context, a key figure was that of Gabriel Harvey who was Spenser’s tutor atCambridge. Likewise, Harvey had been strongly influenced by Sir Thomas Smith,described as a ‘scholar, diplomat [and] political theorist’ (p. 163). Indeed Smith haddeveloped a keen interest in colonial theory and how it was applied to Ireland andhe also acquired lands in the Ards Peninsula in 1571. This impressive article thereforecharts the mental and educational process of colonial thinking on Spenser in termsof what his tutors and mentors encouraged him to read and reflect on. Crucially,Hadfield argues that ‘the discussions of colonial policy by soldiers, statesmen andacademics developed out of an intellectual culture that helped to put theory intopractice’ (p. 170).

Phil Withington’s article on ‘Plantation and Civil Society’ focuses on corporatismand the corporate process in the Plantation, based especially on the writings of

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humanists such as Sir Thomas Smith (mentioned above). An interesting quantitativeanalysis of the assimilation of the words ‘company’ and ‘society’ into the Englishprinted language is undertaken. Likewise, the different types of urban society inEngland are discussed in the context of providing a template for the Plantation. Thus,the Plantation of Ulster was part of a ‘corporate process’ (p. 73), the Plantation cameat a time when the words company/society overtook the word state with regard to‘print visibility’ (p. 68), and that Ulster can be viewed as a ‘red-hot crucible’ for theform of ‘civil society’ that defined ‘much of provincial England’ as opposed to beinga ‘laboratory’ of empire (p. 69). Ian Archer’s article on ‘The city of London and theUlster Plantation’ follows on from this. This is of interest in its own right, given therole of the city in the Londonderry and Coleraine plantations, but the focal point ofthe article is on the neglected issue of relations between the city of London and thecrown, the decision of the Court of the Star Chamber of 28 February 1635 whichfound the city guilty of a range of offences in its management of the Londonderryplantation resulting in a hefty £70,000 fine, and the later attempted rapprochementby Charles I towards the city regarding the Londonderry plantation on 25 November1641. Thus the politics of the plantation are linked to the troubles that later afflictedCharles I in 1641.

Willy Maley’s article examines how Ireland and the Plantation reflected in Jacobeanliterature. Much of this deals with outlining trends, arguments and analyses in thehistoriography covering these issues, which is useful in its own right for the non-Jacobean literary specialist. Interestingly, it seems likely that English theatre companiesvisited southern Ireland in the seventeenth century. Furthermore, a production ofMuch Ado About Nothing was held at Coleraine before 28 May 1628. This opens upthe interesting dimension of the cultural and social life of the Planters’ world and this isperhaps something that could be further developed by other scholars. Maley describeshow Ireland and Irish characters abound in Jacobean literature and how ‘Ulster wasalso a site of sexualised depictions of imperial power’ (p. 223). Therefore we have aninteresting and scholarly literary dimension to the Plantation and this adds a refreshingingredient to the book as a whole. Textual analysis and the literary theme continue inNicholas McDowell’s article on John Milton and the failure of the Ulster Plantation.The focus of this piece is on Milton’s attitudes towards the Scots and the Scots Plantersin Ulster as articulated in his famous Observations (1649). Milton was, of course, thenewly appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues by the Council of State of the EnglishRepublic. McDowell notes that there has been a renewed interest in the Observationsboth for the political and historical readings of Milton and for a better understandingof governing the three kingdoms. Much of Milton’s arguments in the tract were bothanti-Presbyterian and anti-Scottish. At this time Milton was also writing his Historyof Britain, not published until 1670, in which his theory of conquest and slavery wasarticulated. In what is a complex argument in the Observations, Milton expressed theopinion that ‘Presbyterianism was as foreign to true English values as Catholicismand Judaism’ (p. 241), that the Plantation of Ulster had failed and that the Planters‘or rather the faction of Presbyterianism for which they stood in the Observations,presented as great a threat to the liberties of the English state as the Gaelic Irish’(p. 243). Hence Milton was ‘concerned that Presbyterian tyrants would invade from

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Scotland and Ireland to make a conquest of England’ (p. 244). He also describedEngland as ‘a Countrey better than thir own’ (quoted p. 244). For Milton, therefore,Scottish Presbyterians and English Royalists were ‘ran together’ with Irish Catholicsas ‘a monstrous and foreign threat to English Protestant values’ (p. 246).

From a different standpoint, the response of Gaelic poets to the Plantation isconsidered by Marc Caball and Gaelic letters on the Plantation are analysed byDiarmaid Ó Doibhlin. These two articles collectively constitute an important featureof the book by giving significant attention to the native Irish Gaelic literary response.This is not a book that is exclusively focused on the mindset and activities of thePlanters. The Irish Gaelic poetry and letters that are discussed are fascinating in theirown right, but they also give a useful insight into how the Scots settlers were regarded.The Gaelic Irish, according to one poet, have been supplanted in their own countryby the ‘men of Scotland’ and the ‘youths of London’ (p. 178). Likewise the poetry ofEochaidh Ó hEódhusa (he was the poet to the Maguires of Fermanagh) emphasisedthe themes of ‘Ireland’s territorial sovereignty and foreign intrusion’ (p. 181). MícheálÓ Cléirigh’s poem, ‘Where have the Gaels gone?’ [in translation], states that ‘Wehave in their place, a proud and impure swarm of strangers of English and Scottishextraction. Saxons are there and Scotsmen’ (p. 202). The battle speech given by OwenRoe O’Neill before his rout of Scottish Covenanting armed forces at the 1646 Battleof Benburb is recorded in the ‘journal’ of the Franciscan friar Toirealach Ó Mealláin.Thus, ‘There before you are God’s enemies and the enemies of your souls; and fightbravely against them today. Because it is they who took your lordships from you andyour families and your spiritual and temporal life. And they took your lands and sentyou into exile’ (p. 207).

The Catholic Church in Ulster under the plantation, 1609–42, is the subject ofBrian MacCuarta’s article. This is an important article for understanding the religiousdynamics of Ulster. The thrust of the article is that by the time of the 1641 Ulsterrebellion ‘the Roman Catholic Church was so strong that its prelates and clergy soonreplaced the Church of Ireland as the de facto ecclesiastical establishment in those largeareas of mid-and west Ulster under Irish military control’ (p. 119). Interesting snippetsof information on Scottish activities can be found, such as the end of the ‘well-established trend for students from Donegal and Derry’ travelling to Glasgow due tothe ‘growing Presbyterian ethos there’ (p. 121), as well as the strength of Catholicrenewal in the province that made it ‘a place of refuge for Scots recusants fleeingreligious coercion in their homeland’, such as recusants from Paisley and Dumfries(p. 132). The MacDonnells of Antrim did much to provide a refuge on their Antrimestates, for example to the Jesuit Patrick Anderson in 1621. One important theme thatis highlighted is the ‘links between the Catholic communities in the Jacobean realms’(p. 132). Continuing this theme, Colin Breen discusses ‘Randal MacDonnell and earlyseventeenth-century settlement in northeast Ulster, 1603–30’. Breen emphasises theimportance of archaeological research and material culture for a full understanding ofthe Ulster Plantation and fascinating pieces of evidence are provided throughout thearticle, such as a two-storey house that was excavated in 2009. This was possiblythe house of a Scottish merchant who was in residence by 1614. Archaeologicalfinds included Scottish coins and a mid-sixteenth century Polish coin, ‘possibly

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kept and worn as a souvenir from earlier Scottish migrations to Europe’ (p. 152).Hence there is evidence of migratory trends linking Scotland, Poland, and Ulster.Archaeological evidence suggests a ‘thriving’ MacDonnell estate by the 1630s, stronglyindicating a successful ‘unofficial’ plantation in the MacDonnell estates with ‘itsvibrant new settlements representing diverse communities of Irish, Scots and English’(p. 155).

Many of the articles are interlinked, although they stand alone in their own right.In terms of the articles already discussed, this would apply to one of the openingarticles, namely that of Martin McGregor on ‘Civilising Gaelic Scotland: the ScottishIsles and the Stewart Empire’. Themes of civility and the geopolitics of Ireland springto mind here, especially as they are examined from the perspective of Gaelic Scotland.The conquest of Ireland, from the perspective of the Stewart empire, therefore ‘meantthe withering of the military power of the Isles’ and that ‘it became clear verysoon after 1600 that the great age of the Hebridean mercenary, galley and sea-girtcastle – the very pillars of Clan Donald power was gone’ (p. 49). Yet links are madewith the problems that Charles I was later to encounter in the 1630s. The failure ofthe Company of Lewis, promoted by the MacKenzies and their Dutch links, in thelate 1620s led to the creation of the Association of the Fishing of Great Britain andIreland/Royal British Fisheries Company licensed by Charles I in 1632. The pursuitof British economic uniformity in this context was to provide political trouble forthe king in the 1630s. This inter-linkage in the articles can also be identified in thepreceding contribution by Jenny Wormald who offers a new analysis of James VI andIreland in her piece on ‘The “British” crown, the earls and the plantation of Ulster’,focusing on his style of kingship. James imported to Ulster ‘his tried and tested beliefin the efficacy of the great local lord’ (p. 24). The key to this policy was deemed tobe the earl of Tyrone who, for James, ‘was the Irish equivalent of the earl of Huntly’(p. 23). This article will probably have a significant impact on how James’s relationshipwith Ireland can be reassessed as well as debates on the well-known ‘British’ problem.Thus, Scotland and Ireland had ‘more in common’ than England and Ireland andindeed, ‘in a limited sense’, than Scotland and England. Due to the experience of hisScottish Gaels, James ‘never saw Irish efforts in the English terms of suppression andruthless Anglicisation’, nor was he afraid of Catholics (p. 29). In essence, then, Jamesas ruler of his Irish kingdom and policies is portrayed in a much more favourable lightin the politics of plantation and the three kingdoms. Raymond Gillespie considersthe central theme of ‘Success and Failure in the Ulster plantation’, emphasising theexperience at the local level as opposed to Dublin, London or Edinburgh for thatmatter, as well as the difficulty of the plantation process and the thin line betweensuccess and failure as perceived by those who were there on the ground at thetime. The plantation was ‘as much about the creation of a new social order as itwas about introducing settlers and modifying the landscape’ (p. 114) and that by‘considering the settlement of Ulster as an exercise in social creation rather thansimply one of colonisation, and by ensuring that from the earliest stage each of theparticipants had a role to play in wider society, the planners hit on the ingredients forsuccess’.

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The book needs to be read cover to cover for a full understanding of the argumentsdeployed, for an interdisciplinary awareness and for linkage between the articles.Perhaps the articles could have been presented in a more thematic manner, especiallyfor non-experts, but that is one of the standard difficulties of an edited book. Whatwe do now have collectively is a greater awareness of the significance of the Plantationof Ulster in more depth. But what we also need, from the perspective of the historianof Scotland, is a scholarly monograph on Scotland and the Plantation of Ulster,including, of course, its impact on Scottish society.

John R. Young (University of Strathclyde)

Angela McCarthy, Personal Narratives of Irish and Scottish Migration, 1921–65. ‘Forspirit and adventure’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Pp. xi + 257.Paperback 978–0-7190-7353-3, £15.99).DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2014.0125

The popular and political engagement with the diaspora has waned in the yearssince this book first appeared in hardback in 2007. Nowadays, it has becomecommon to learn from newspaper comment and ministerial briefings that engagementwith the diaspora is no longer the priority it once was. Political events haveredirected focus from those settled distant from Scotland to those within thenation’s geographic boundaries. First Minister Alex Salmond might have argued in2013 that to be a Scot ‘the maximum entitlement to citizenship’ was his party’sgoal (The Herald, 17 January 2013), yet home residency not ethnic connectiondetermined eligibility to vote in the referendum on the nation’s future in September2014.

It is against this political background that an assessment of Personal Narratives of Irishand Scottish Migration can be set. The strength of the volume lies in the rich evidencegathered through interviews conducted by the Ellis Island Immigration Museum andinterviews conducted on behalf of New Zealand’s Ministry for Culture and Heritageand other local and national oral history projects. Each set of data was selectedby McCarthy and synthesised within key strands of diaspora scholarship. Perhapssurprisingly given the nature of the qualitative evidence, the book’s introductorychapter deals only sparingly with the methodological issues involved, the challengeof using testimony gathered under conditions over which the author has no controlbeing the most difficult. There is a similar lack of conceptual direction in the earlysections. Diaspora, of all terms predominates, but even that concept is given onlytwo pages of dedicated investigation before a more empirically based overview isintroduced. A comparison of Irish and Scottish migration figures is then presented tostructure the national picture, but this only occupies a further two pages – and whatfollows are observations on general socio-economic conditions that tend to facilitatethe decision to emigrate, but absent, decisively, are the specific conditions that mightsituate the personal testimony in the socio-economic history of the respective nations.So while the chapter on ‘historiography and context’ introduces the role of agents

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in facilitating emigration and the role of child migration schemes, economic anddemographic factors are glossed over, with no engagement with the impact of theSecond World War or the ‘great European migration’ on Irish and Scots diasporicformations. Similarly skewed, when chapter one concludes on ‘identities’, its focusfalls on the use of symbols rather than any detailed engagement with the conceptof ethnicity within a transnationalist context. Here the analysis of anthropologicalmarkers might well be supported by the work of A.P. Cohen, yet this only servesto misdirect the reader from Cohen’s key contribution in this area – the concept of‘personal nationalism’ – which would offer a more fitting analysis of personal (notgroup) narratives.

These opening two chapters are a missed opportunity to establish a conceptuallyinformed and theoretically nuanced interpretative framework for the evidence. What,in looking at the economic determinants for migration, are we to make of ‘There wasno money’ from the oral testimony (p. 40), or the observation from McCarthy that‘The most damning of testimonies recounting the lack of economic opportunity incertain parts of Scotland is . . . ’ (p. 41) if there is only limited conceptual guidanceand no direct link to the socio-economic history of the period in each country?The strength is the book remains with the sources, allowing McCarthy to commenton (amongst other factors) the political reasons for migration and the desire fora sense of adventure. But would greater success have come from matching thesepersonal accounts with local, regional and national trends? Not in any mechanisticway, but in an attempt to look at the time lag from when conditions might suggestemigration was ‘the answer’, to when the decision was made to operationalise thatconclusion?

Confirmation that the government paid a migrant’s passage and the importanceof migrant networks, along with evidence of what comprised the contents of themigrant’s packing case and accounts of sorrow upon leaving, are indicative gemsfrom the evidence. As too are accounts of on-board conditions, the circumstancesmet upon arrival, along with investigation into life in a ‘British world’ overseas,the results varying considerably between those who arrived in America and thosewhose destination was an imperial one. But throughout the book McCarthy allowsherself too little time to do analytical justice to the evidence, packing togethercomplex strands of interpretation when unpacking was required. Whether thepractical networks that ensured a family would not starve or freeze to death duringtheir first winter should be included alongside associational identity formation – forIrish and Scots migrants, and across a range of destinations – is a decision for thestructure of this book that is open to question. And a number of such observations canbe made. The material on language and dialect and the reasons for return migrationare particularly interesting, the author placing the interview evidence within a widereading of migration scholarship. Yet the analysis here is slight and even the concludingchapter, at just over four pages, starts off with a reiteration of approach rather thanmoving decisively to complete the circle from evidence to analysis. Just as ourpoliticians might rue taking their eye off the diasporic ball, so scholarship must be

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prepared to do the ugly work of securing empirical and analytical depth in equalmeasure.

Graeme Morton (University of Dundee)

Stana Nenadic and Sally Tuckett, Colouring the Nation: The Turkey Red PrintedCotton Industry in Scotland c.1840–1940 (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland,2013. Pp. xi + 147; illus. Paperback ISBN 978-1-9052-6780-4, £17.99).DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2014.0126

Stana Nenadic and Sally Tuckett’s informative study Colouring the Nation: The TurkeyRed Printed Cotton Industry in Scotland c.1840–1940 traces the industrial history ofTurkey Red cotton manufacturing in nineteenth century Scotland. The natural dye,known for its bright red, fade-resistant colour, was used in manufacturing plain, redfabric and also cotton prints with attractive designs. Nenadic and Tuckett explainthat Turkey Red was a charming concoction of madder root, alum, ‘bullock’s bloodand urine and sheep dung’ (p. 1). Indeed, blood and excrement in natural dyes wascommon at the time as they served to strengthen properties of colour. The otherred natural dye available during the period was cochineal – a scarlet dye based on thescaly insect cochineal. Around 1865, newly invented, cheap chemical dyes floodedthe market. Alizarin, the principal red agent, was isolated in 1869, and after 1873root madder was replaced by a chemical compound at a tenth of the price – leadingto German and Swiss emergence as key players in the field. The importance ofmadder, predictably, decreased after this time. William Morris, artist and influentialdesigner of the late nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement, had attempted torevive natural dyes for artistic purposes. For the interested reader, Robert Chenciner’sMadder Red: A History of Luxury and Trade (2000) offers a related discussion ondyeing.

Given that textile industries were competitive and strove to be cutting-edge, theirneed for secrecy to protect commercial interests can be a serious hindrance for thetwentieth-century historian. Nenadic and Tuckett use sources extant in the Universityof Glasgow Archives; Manchester County Record Office; Mersey Maritime Museum,Liverpool; National Archives, Kew; and National Museums Scotland to weave apersuasive narrative of the Scottish Turkey Red cotton industry. This study, alongsidea digital catalogue and exhibition of National Museums Scotland’s Turkey RedCollection, is the result of a two-year research project titled ‘Colouring the Nation’based at Edinburgh University.

Nenadic and Tuckett examine three prominent Scottish dyers: William Stirling& Sons, John Orr Ewing & Co., and Archibald Orr Ewing & Co. owned by hisbrother Archibald, as well as the later United Turkey Red Company, which mergedall three companies. The archival scholarship associated with these ‘big three’ dyeingindustries of Scotland, forms the core of this study. The first, William Stirling, aGlasgow merchant, founded his firm in the Vale of Leven around mid-century.

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Stirling’s company processed unbleached cotton produced in Glasgow or Manchesterat two sites: at the Cordale Printworks and the Dalquhurn Dyeworks situated nearthe village of Renton. That these two sites employed almost 1,500 workers in 1868speaks to the scale of their manufacture and their socio-cultural prominence. Stirling’sannual production, for example, was almost nineteen million yards of cloth (p. 5) andtheir market included India, and later Sri Lanka, Burma, Singapore, Indonesia andthe Philippines. The fabrics meant for export featured colourful Eastern designs: ‘thepaisley cone, peacocks and dancing girls’ (p. 7), and these are helpfully reproducedin the book. As part of a significant industry, these fabrics were exhibited ingreat International Exhibitions in Britain to highlight the progress made in tradeand industry.

The firm of William Stirling faced competition from those of Orr Ewing. Thefounder of the Orr Ewing companies was John Orr Ewing, and his company becamethe largest Turkey Red manufacturer in the Vale of Leven. John began manufacturingTurkey Red products with his partner, Robert Alexander in 1835. By the 1870s,the number of their employees had risen to 1,600 and was deemed the largest suchfirm in Britain (p. 9). Alongside this successful venture, his brother, Archibald OrrEwing, set up his own Turkey Red industry at Levenbank near Jamestown. By 1878its workforce had grown to 2,000 and their produce enjoyed a thriving and widespreaddemand from countries including India, Greece, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, NewZealand, Sri Lanka, Mozambique, South Africa, Iraq, Japan and Fiji. Throughouttheir existence, the Scottish industries faced competition amongst themselves andalso from Manchester factories, and by the end of the nineteenth century they were,in addition, undermined by Asian manufacturers. To counter the Asian threat, allthree companies merged to form the United Turkey Red Company in 1898 whichremained in production until 1960.

The Turkey Red industry was one of the important industries of nineteenthcentury Scotland, and a fascinating aspect of its history is its links to the worldoutside Britain. The ‘Bombay Pattern Book’, a catalogue present in the NationalMuseums Scotland, for example, features colourful and attractive Eastern designsproduced by these great Scottish dyeing firms. Texts such as these provide witnessto a dynamic ‘print culture’ shaped by the empire, which economically empoweredand artistically enriched the Scottish outlook. The cultural exchange attendanton business histories sometimes goes unrecognised – the Paisley shawl industry,in the Scottish industrial town of Paisley, for example, was well-known for itsproduction of ‘imitation’ Indian shawls. Based on the expensive shawls from theIndian subcontinent, the manufacturers used the ‘pine cone’ or ‘paisley’ designcharacteristic of Kashmir shawls in their print and woven accessories with remarkablesuccess.

Nenadic and Tuckett’s book is illustrated generously with colour and black-and-white pictures. Colourful images of trade cards, textile samples, labels for export,and portraits of the proprietors – alongside historic photographs of workers, andthe objects associated with the industry – make this book an attractive production,bringing to life the wonderful and historic world of Turkey Red productions. Thestrength of their book is in its close focus on three firms, and although the book tends

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to evade larger historical questions, it is an important contribution to scholarship onthe textile industry in Scotland.

Suchitra Choudhury (Independent researcher)

Tanja Bueltmann, Andrew Hinson and Graeme Morton, The Scottish Diaspora(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Pp. vi + 298. Paperback ISBN 978-0-7486-4892-4, £24.99).DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2014.0127

As readers of the Scottish Government’s Diaspora Engagement Plan of 2010 will know,increasing interest in contemporary global diaspora internationally has been reflectedin increased interest in the idea of a ‘Scottish Diaspora’ and its historical context. Thistextbook provides a focused and admirably concise manual relating to the conceptwritten by a team of scholars who cannot be neatly pigeonholed as ‘Scottish’. Part ofthe interest in Scottish global ‘diaspora’ is the ‘global reach’ it gives modern Scotlandwhich, at the time of writing, remains part of the UK and through the UK part ofthe European Community. The value of this book lies in the thematic ‘Section One’rather than in the more descriptive second half of the book focusing on destinations.

One of the themes addressed by the text is ‘return migration’, a neglected aspectof Scottish migration history which requires more systematic research in the future.The focus here is ‘the orientation of a diaspora towards a homeland’ (p. 146).Charles Edward Stuart famously declared that he had come ‘home’ in 1745 as part ofan enterprise that was not exactly ‘Roots-tourism’ (see p. 141), but did illustratethe transnational nature of Jacobitism and ideas of Scottish national identity. Thedistinction between sojourners in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, as opposed towhat might be termed destinations of settlement in the analysis of return migrationadvanced here does not always convince. It implicitly accepts that the children of themany young Scottish men by mothers who were not ‘Scottish’, somehow, despitean entrenched culture of patriarchy in Scotland itself, were not themselves Scottish.What we need from future research is more work on the hitherto neglected impactof return migrants, and later the temporary return of ‘tourists’ who were Scottish bybirth, on Scottish culture and national identity. As early as the nineteenth century theidea that all that made Scotland truly Scottish (particularly the Gaelic language) wouldno longer exist in what was historically and geographically Scotland had already begunto be expressed.

One important point about the identity of a ‘diaspora’ is that it is made up ofthose who self-identify with what it represents. Just because an individual was bornin Scotland they were/are not necessarily part of the ‘Scottish Diaspora’. Equally,there has been little discussion of the impact of other ‘diasporas’ on Scotland. TheIrish Diaspora is the most obvious example and one which has attracted serious andsubstantial scholarly interest. The upsurge of interest in and public awareness of therole of Scots and Scotland in the Atlantic slave trade (although there are a few knownexamples of Asian slaves being brought to Scotland) also now incorporates the ‘BlackDiaspora’ into Scottish history. The Scottish role in the globalisation of American

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influence, as the United States became more than a single continent national powerby the end of the nineteenth century, has been neglected. Instead, the focus has beenon Scotland and the British Empire (see the Oxford History of the British Empirecompanion volumes Scotland and the British Empire and Migration and Empire), or the‘global migration of the Scottish people’, which ignores the fact that the influence ofthe U.S. on Scotland was significant. The cultural and moral identity which developedin Scottish public culture by the end of the nineteenth century (think of James Bryce)was just as important as the impact of the U.S. on the growing autonomy of Irishnationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Another useful and important chapter in this book is that on ‘AssociationalCulture’. The Scottish example became a powerful exemplar for ethnic/nationalassociational culture more generally. As John MacKenzie has pointed out, Scottish‘societies and organizations not only offered mutual help and security, but also a senseof belonging and of distinguishing themselves from those around them’ (Scotlandand the British Empire, p. 13). It also can be argued that if Scottish associationalculture could be described as exceptional, it was from a rather negative perspective.In the second edition of Robin Cohen’s classic text Global Diasporas, the Scottishexample is specifically condemned (p. 77) as part of British imperial ‘exaggerationof metropolitan manners, particularly in the case of the English, but not forgettinginstances like the “kilt culture” of the overseas Scots, derived directly from theimperial heritage – the heritage of the quasi-aristocratic rule over “the natives”’. Yetthis is an analysis that may be more accurate in relation to Scottish associational culturein Africa and Asia than in America during the nineteenth century, particularly asScottish working class emigrants began to seek higher wages in Australia and NewZealand as well as Canada and the United States.

Lucid, controversial and innovative, The Scottish Diaspora will provoke furtherdebate and stimulate further research on a very exciting aspect of Scottish History,and for that we should all be grateful to its authors.

Alexander Murdoch (University of Edinburgh)

Andrews C. Holman and Robert B. Kristofferson (eds), More of a Man: Diaries ofa Scottish Craftsman in Mid-Nineteenth-Century North America (Toronto: Universityof Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. 492. Paper ISBN 978-1-4426-1164-1, $35.00).DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2014.0128

From five years of diary entries by Andrew McIlwraith, a Scottish craftsmanestablishing himself in Canada West in the 1850s and ’60s, Andrew Holman andRobert Kristofferson have created a volume which shifts easily between the lifeof one young man and the great trends of the industrialising west. As well as thediary, the edited volume consists of a series of documents written by McIlwraith,an introduction, an epilogue, and liberal annotations evidencing meticulous researchfrom Canada, the United States and Scotland.

McIlwraith’s diary entries are brief, readable accounts of his daily activities. Henotes the work he did, the chess games he won or lost of the evening, the books

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he read, his friendships, his walks, his shooting expeditions, his musical endeavoursand his interest in various young women, especially Mary Goldie. He is not a manwho used his diary to explore emotions: his interest in or boredom at a sermon, hisfrustration at a muddy walk and, occasionally, his affection for his intended. Not forhim soul-analysing introspection. Even his most emotive diary entries about Marywere sparse: ‘strongly in the belief that Mary Goldie will make the best wife for meof anybody I know’, ‘drove into the village along with my dearest Mary’. His accountof his trip home to Scotland is almost entirely devoid of sentiment. The closest hegets to recording the excitement that he may have felt was his record of ‘A delightfulclear fresh morning and the sail up Clyde most glorious. Landed in Greenock at 8.30and took the first train home. Arrived in Ayr at 12.30. Found Jane and ChristinaStewart waiting. Mother and Mr H. at home. Called on Mr Park in the evening.’McIlwraith was an outgoing, friendly man, enthusiastic about work and hobbies. Hewas not dour or overly self-constrained so it is unlikely that he was as unaffected byevents as his entries suggests. Neither did he use his diary for spiritual reflection, or forrecording day-to-day business as did other nineteenth-century diary-keepers. Rather,he explains his motivation in January 1858 when he considered the ‘propriety of everyman writing memoirs of himself . . . to fix in a man’s own mind, a sense of the progresshe has made in moral and intellectual ideas, to mark the changes in his sensations . . . toexcite a feeling of gratitude for those many providential interpositions’. McIlwraith’sdiary did not perhaps bear quite the elevated fruits he intended, but certainly succeedsin showcasing the daily interest of an intelligent, active young man in a period of rapidsocial and economic change.

The bulk of the volume is the diary, but it is set within several associated pieces ofwriting by McIlwraith. The first document is his 1860 published letter to the AyrshireTimes discussing the relative merits of working in America and Britain. Placed afterthe main text, is a list of the numerous volumes borrowed by McIlwraith from theMechanics’ Institute Library in Newton-on-Ayr. These provide insight into the self-improvement culture and mentality of early Victorian Scotland. Another appendixconsists of a curious assortment of cash accounts, poems and lists of letters received andsent. Together, the collection fills out the picture of McIlwraith as a skilled tradesman,a consumer, a Scot, an emigrant and a participant in the cultural, social and politicallife of burgeoning, industrialising Canada West.

The diary is bookended by an analytical introduction and a largely narrativeepilogue. The epilogue deals with the events of McIlwraith’s life after the diarycloses in 1862, placing McIlwraith, his family life and especially his work, withinthe society and economy of industrialising Ontario. It highlights the changing natureof craft and the continued importance of personal networks even as industry becamemore depersonalised. The introduction considers ‘the life and times’ of McIlwraithin a concise 36 pages. The main focus is the three related themes implied inthe book’s title: work, self-improvement and masculinity. Each thread is unravelledin short, accessible and learned sub-sections. While the introduction provides thehistorical and historiographical context for McIlwraith, its analytical points are moremeaningful after the reader has perused at least one year of the man’s diary. What isparticularly interesting about McIlwraith is that he stands on the threshold. Holman

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and Kristofferson effectively place him in the liminality of his work and familylife, as he struggles to establish himself as a tradesman and paterfamilias. Theyalso implicitly place him within the liminality of a rapidly industrialising Canadawhich was developing an increasingly national identity. McIlwraith, however, alsostands on other thresholds. Despite copious footnotes as to his leisure activities, theeditors do not draw out the significance of his diary in illuminating how ordinarytransplanted Scots formulated a sense of self and community partly based on an ethnicculture.

Many Scots-Canadians in the mid-nineteenth century lived in a ‘transatlanticcommunity’. For McIlwraith this took two forms. One was the physical communityof places and people. The other was the mindset and culture created by beingsimultaneously Scottish, British and Canadian. It was no coincidence that AndrewMcIlwraith married a woman from his native county of Ayrshire whom he (probably)met in Canada West. When he spent several months of 1857 in Scotland, muchleisure time was spent with his future brother-in-law and employer, John, and with hisfamily with whom he usually kept in touch through letters and the mutual exchangeof local newspapers. Letters, newspapers, visits across the Atlantic, the constant too-ing and fro-ing of people, and the development of friendship and work networksthrough acquaintances created strong ties between settlers’ home regions and theiradopted homes in Canada West. Andrew McIlwraith’s diary demonstrates how hiswork and leisure patterns and his travelling, helped create a specific transatlanticcommunity which connected Ayrshire with southwest Ontario, especially Sarnia,Dundas, Hamilton, Galt and Guelph. A key feature of this transatlantic communitywas the relative ease with which McIlwraith and his acquaintance crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic. The McIlwraith diary has much to offer historians interested inthe growing field of return migration, especially short-term trips intended as holidays,reunions or scoping for future prospects. The diary also promises more for the studyof Canadian-Scots’ associational culture than the editors have drawn out. The oftenelite Caledonian and St Andrew’s societies play little part in the performance ofMcIlwraith’s ethnicity, but his participation in multifarious organisations, particularlychoirs, debating societies and the Mechanics Institute suggests the importance ofassociations for the social lives and networks of Scottish emigrants, especially youngmen. Informally too, McIlwraith was imbued with Scottish culture. His diaryrecords evenings spent singing Scots songs, reading speeches made at Burns’ Nights,and occasionally chatting about the old country. Most of this is not romanticisedsentimentality. His engagement with his homeland was current, as he delved intoHugh Miller’s books and a Gazetteer of Scotland while keeping well-informedthrough Ayrshire newspapers. He sometimes participated in Scottish traditions, suchas first footing and Hogmanay, but equally enjoyed New York’s Fourth of Julycelebrations. His diary was a place where his transatlantic personal identity did notneed to be filtered, epitomised in the mix of occasional Scots words, ‘dreich’, andNorth American words, ‘vest and pants’, slipping into the standard English of hisdaily entries. McIlwraith was an urban man of industry who was comfortably Scottishand Canadian, inhabiting both worlds physically, socially and culturally. The editorshave done an excellent job in situating him personally and economically in Canada,

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however the diary also offers much to those whose interests lie in Scottish emigration,especially those concerned with migrant identities and ethnic culture.

Elizabeth Ritchie (University of the Highlands and Islands)

Matthew L. McDowell, A Cultural History of Association Football in Scotland,1865–1902. Understanding Sports as a way of Understanding Society (Lewiston,Queenstown, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 432. PaperbackISBN 978-0-7734-4525-3, $49.95).DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2014.0129

The book aspires to fill a long-standing historiographical gap: writing on Scottishfootball has long been dominated, as have the game’s domestic honours boards, by the‘Old Firm’ of Celtic and Glasgow Rangers, with the result that discussion has centeredon themes of religious and national difference. Equally, the degree to which footballhas over time promoted or, following Jim Sillars’ lament that his fellow countrymenwere ‘ninety-minute patriots’, impeded the development of a sense of nationhoodamong Scots, has long been a preoccupation of academic debate, with the resultthat the sport’s local origins and its evolving relationship with the industrial, urbancultures that generated and nurtured it have hitherto been substantially overlooked.Here, Matthew McDowell seeks to rectify these imbalances through a close study offootball as it emerged in the area in and around Glasgow from the late decades of thenineteenth century. Such a focus may be justified given the game’s intense followingin that region, but it does mean that the broader promise held out by the book’s title isnever quite realised. If anything, however, this merely serves to underscore the pointthat McDowell’s work is an early contribution to a debate that still has far to go.

In pursuing his theme, McDowell has looked in most of the right places:contemporary newspapers in particular have been scoured, along with the fewmanuscript sources bestowed on posterity by the game’s founders, to trace the originsof the clubs that emerged at both senior and junior levels in the later nineteenthcentury, locating them firmly in their broader social and economic context. Thebook’s claim to offer a cultural history of the sport is then justified by chapters whichexplore the game’s wider impact through the encouragement of sociability, taken toextremes it might be thought when clubs on Glasgow’s south side were suspectedof acting as brothels, through the relationship between teams and their supporters,and the manner in which the game secured popular attention through press coverage.If the sources used to inform the study appear wholly appropriate, the interpretiveframework within which they are placed is open to some criticism.

The focus throughout is on the game’s structural development following theformation of Queen’s Park in 1867. Useful linkages are drawn with the broader socialsetting: the impact of educational institutions is traced by reference to the Academiesat Hamilton and Ayr, and that of the military is pursued through the many Volunteerbattalions established across the west of Scotland in the period. Ties to the workplace,so prominent in the case of Beith F.C. that they became referred to as the ‘CabinetMakers’, are examined in a variety of settings, bringing out the close links between

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football and the region’s skilled working class. Religion inevitably intrudes, and theuse of sport to cement a close sense of identity among the region’s migrant Catholicpopulation, to the extent that Greenock had its own Catholic Football Associationby 1886, is noted. A comparable approach was also evident among communities ofHighlanders lured to the central belt by the promise of economic reward, contributingin the process to the early history of Rangers.

This confluence of forces gave rise to what McDowell is keen to present asa ‘unique’ sporting culture. Yet the approach taken here tends, if anything, toundermine that claim, as the institutions given prominence also figure in accountsof football’s origins elsewhere. In exploring his themes, McDowell has chosen tooperate within an established, and by now somewhat faded, historiography. Morerecent work on the sport’s development prior to its emergence in its more ‘modern’,organised form, by Adrian Harvey among others, receives no mention here andindeed McDowell’s treatment of football’s earlier history in Scotland is fleeting at best.The degree to which Scottish football followed a distinctive path, which might haveinformed its later history, cannot be established from what is written here. To be fair,that may not have been McDowell’s intention, but the opportunity to build on thePh.D. from which this book derives to construct a more robust interpretive overviewof Scottish football has not been taken. There are other debates with which the bookengages only fitfully, such as the behaviour of crowds. Here again, the tendency towork within parameters set by others, in this case Neil Tranter and Wray Vamplew, isevident. The value of the book thus resides largely in the empirical detail it adds ratherthan the new insights which consideration of the Scottish dimension might offer.

As a small aside, it might be noted that the publishers, in offering this book forreview, have seen fit to issue a ten-point guide on how to write a book review.While the desire to ensure that authors receive fair treatment is laudable, this maynot be the best way of achieving that. This reviewer would hesitate before trying totell Edwin Mellen Press how to publish books, and the press might have exercisedsimilar discretion. It is to be hoped that prospective purchasers are not presented witha further set of bullet points on how to read a book. Dr McDowell is in no wayresponsible for his publisher’s excessive zeal and so the final verdict must rest on thetext, for which he does bear responsibility. To adopt a footballing analogy, this bookresembles a substitution brought about to ensure that the team continues to observe aset formation and pattern of play; a game changer it is not.

Trevor Griffiths (University of Edinburgh)

Jenni Calder, Lost in the Backwoods: Scots and the North American Wilderness (Edinburgh:Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Pp. viii + 246. Paperback ISBN 978-0-7486-4738-5, £19.99).DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2014.0130

Jenni Calder’s Lost in the Backwoods: Scots and the North American Wilderness utilisesseveral intersecting themes to chart the history of Scottish experiences in NorthAmerica, with a particular focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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The notion and perception of ‘wilderness’ serves as the central axis for Calder’s text,and it is around this theme that other subjects, such as exploration, exploitation andconservation, rotate. Calder’s approach is informed by a variety of period sources aswell as more recently published literature that takes Scottish experiences of wildernessas inspiration, and in some respects Lost in the Backwoods could be read as a broadliterary history of Scots in frontier landscapes. This is not the text’s only contribution,however, as the inclusion and organisation of topics has been orchestrated in such away as to highlight the diversity of motivations, approaches and outcomes wrought bythe wider social and economic issues of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thesuffering of reluctant settlers and ill-prepared explorers features alongside examplesof Scots who capitalised on the wilderness for industrial wealth and leisure; whilethe feverish impulses to farm, mine and hunt contrasts with the appreciation of thewilderness as a source of knowledge and beauty.

The study of Scottish experiences in eighteenth and nineteenth century NorthAmerica is not a new field, and many of the people and events that Calder includesin Lost in the Backwoods will be familiar to both academic and general audiences. TheRed River settlement in Manitoba and the 1773 voyage of the ship Hector to Pictou(Nova Scotia) are commonly included in historical accounts of Scottish settlement inNorth America, for instance, and while Calder follows this tradition by incorporatingthem in her text, they serve not as focal points but instead as recognisable features inwhat might otherwise be unfamiliar terrain. The ‘Desperate Undertakings’ narrativeof chapter three, for example, weaves together the relatively well-rehearsed accounts ofthe experiences of Alexander Mackenzie, Simon Fraser and John Rae with the lesserknown journeys of Scottish fur-traders in the employ of the Pacific Fur Company,and Scottish scientists and explorers on the ill-fated 1819 overland expedition intothe Arctic. Though, as Calder acknowledges, ‘obscurity has [. . . ] been the legacyof most of the many hundreds of Scots’ involved in the exploration of largeswathes of the North American wilderness (p. 82), the inclusion of some of theseScots alongside the formidable figures of Mackenzie, Fraser and Rae in Calder’stext serves as an invitation for others to revisit this aspect of Scottish-Americanhistory.

There are two common characteristics that unite the men and women who arefeatured in Lost in the Backwoods, their wilderness surroundings and their nationality,and both commonalities are drawn upon by Calder as means for comparingexperiences. It is acknowledged early in the introductory chapter that Scots were‘identified as robust material for settlement in the New World’ (p. 2) as they oftenexhibited traits of perseverance in (and resignation to) adverse conditions. Throughoutthe text, stories of survival and endurance are accompanied by the observation that,at least to eighteenth and nineteenth century observers, the attributes that made thesefeats possible were inherently ‘Scottish’ in origin. This is not to say that every Scotwho travelled through and experienced the North American wilderness was identicalin temper and ambition, Calder is careful to point out (pp. 81–82), but instead that thesingular and self-reliant nature of many of these Scots appears to have been inspired bycommon social, cultural and environmental factors such as the Scottish Presbyterianfaith, and the acceptance of remote and inhospitable locations in which to eke out

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a living. This is an interesting observation that contributes to our understanding ofthe intentional recruitment of Scots on the basis of ethnicity, as well as the perceptionof ‘Scottishness’ as a distinct set of character traits, that occurred in many locationsaround the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The other common attribute amongst those featured in Calder’s text, that of thewilderness locale, also offers up a wealth of observations about the experiences ofScots in North America. While ‘Scottishness’ was typically perceived as ensuring aspecific (usually positive) outcome amongst those who possessed it, the same is nottrue of the wilderness which had all manner of effects on the people it encompassed.The isolation, destitution and danger experienced by some Scots as a result of settlingor exploring the North American wilderness directly contrasts with the feelings ofliberation and wonder that were inspired in others; and what was a landscape ofopportunity for some was for others a place of suffering. All of these people wereScottish, and therefore – by the perceptions of the time at least – possessed of similarqualities, and yet the wilderness appears to have provoked a wide variety of reactions.Perhaps, as Calder has noted (p. 2), the reaction of individual Scots was determinedby the cards they were dealt upon arrival: the type of wilderness they were exposedto, the applicability of the skills and knowledge they brought with them, and theproximity of their new abode to trade routes and other settlements could each have adramatic impact.

Lost in the Backwoods is ambitious in scope, and while it is liberally furnished withchapter end notes and a bibliography, its relatively short length and relatively quickpace ultimately result in a work that is more of a starting point than a definitivestudy. In some respects this is one of the text’s strengths as its appeal extends beyondacademic discourse on Scottish migration history and Scottish-American literature,reaching out to more general audiences and providing a point of access into thesefields. Much of the material contained within Lost in the Backwoods was alreadyknown to historians, however Calder has compiled and analysed this material insuch a way as to raise new and wide-ranging questions about Scottish and Scottish-American identity that warrant further exploration by social and literary historiansalike.

Amy Clarke (University of Queensland)

Brad Patterson, Tom Brooking, and Jim McAloon with Rebecca Lenihan and TanjaBueltmann, Unpacking the Kists: The Scots in New Zealand, (Montreal and Kingston,London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press and Dunedin, New Zealand: OtagoUniversity Press, 2013. Pp. xx + 412; maps. Hardback ISBN 978-0-7735-4190-0,$100.00).DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2014.0131

With Unpacking the Kists: The Scots in New Zealand, Patterson, Brooking and McAloonare seeking to redress a perceived imbalance in scholarly attention to New Zealand’s

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Scottish migrants. Increased public interest in ethnic origins and existing works onEnglish and Irish migrants such as Rollo Arnold’s Farthest Promised Land: EnglishVillagers, New Zealand Immigrants of the 1870s and Donald H. Akenson’s Half the Worldfrom Home: Perspectives of the Irish in New Zealand, 1860–1950, published in 1981 and1990 respectively, have heightened this perception. This is not to suggest that NewZealand’s Scots have languished in complete academic obscurity as the work of thebook’s authors and others such as Marjory Harper, Angela McCarthy and RosalindMcClean attest.

However, research has been scattered amongst works on migration or the widerScottish diaspora. The volume draws on this dispersed body of work and the authorshave validated existing understandings against new research. This research has provideda demographic profile of Scottish migrant flows to the 1920s with data gathered froma range of statistical sources. From this they have identified how and to what extentthose migrants adapted to their new environment through the use of community casestudies.

Organised along three distinct themes, chapters two and three summarise theproject’s statistical research and provide the basis for the use of community case studies.The following three chapters evaluate the migrants’ impact and entanglement inthe public spheres of settler economic life, civil society and physical environment.In contrast, the next three chapters focus on the migrants’ private spheres, theircultural traditions and their adaption to and intersection with colonial society.Here the authors address the legacies of Scottish associational culture and othernon-occupational activities such as religion, art and literature, although to creditBurns with the authorship of Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border diminishes theimpact of attributing William Golders’ New Zealand Minstrelsy to ‘the Burns effect’(pp. 251–2).

Existing research has established that the majority of migrants came from theScottish lowlands and that their regional origins largely mirrored Scotland’s populationdistribution. Using their research data, they have built on Rosalind McClean’s 1990Ph.D thesis ‘Scottish Emigrants to New Zealand 1840–1880: motives, means andbackground’, demonstrating continuity into the 1920s. Uniquely, the researchershave utilised a database of over 7,000 records constructed by the Scottish InterestGroup of the New Zealand Society of Genealogists (NZSG), which was found tomirror data from more traditional sources. This could have been significant, as theNZSG database is much more detailed and provides an opportunity for more nuancedresearch. Unfortunately, the opportunity has been partially missed and the richness ofthe NZSG database as a source remains underutilised.

In terms of numbers ‘only about 68,000 . . . of the 1,841,534 Scots who emigratedbefore 1914’ (p. 256) chose New Zealand as a destination. This places New Zealand’smarket share at a low 3.7 per cent (not 6 per cent as stated in the book). However,nowhere else in the British imperial world did the Scots, comprising a little over20 per cent of New Zealand’s nineteenth century European migrants, account for agreater per capita migrant density.

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Perceptions such as James Belich’s assessment of New Zealand as ‘the neo-Scotland’(p. 4) are pervasive. However, in chapter after chapter the conclusions drawn are thatwhile Scots were effective inter-ethnic networkers, curating their identity, they werealso engaging with a colonial society which itself was ‘complementing and shapingScottish identity’ (p. 83). Indeed the picture is one of migrant integration and activeparticipation in the British colonial project. This is reminiscent of William PemberReeves’ contemporary observation that ‘New Zealanders are a British race in a sensein which the inhabitants of the British Islands scarcely are’ (The Long White Cloud,1898).

Interestingly, their research identifies the majority as being from agriculturalbackgrounds and having a ‘disproportionate involvement in farming’ (p. 107).Unfortunately, this is not developed further by assessing whether any financialsurpluses from the Scottish agricultural sector were deployed to other sectorsincreasing Scottish entanglement with the wider economy. Certainly the authors’identification of the over-representation of Scots in the 1897–1905 bourgeoisCyclopedia of New Zealand hints at commercial success. This would go some wayto explaining both the stereotype of the successful Scot and the Scots’ seemingwillingness to embrace colonial society. The flaw here is that in assessing Scottishimpact, the book is primarily focused on the first generation of migrants and largelyoverlooks their descendants.

The dichotomy of the Scottish character is a recurrent theme throughout. Forinstance, discussions with regards to Scottish veneration for education, piety andegalitarianism often sit uncomfortably with the role Scots played as the military armor enforcers of Empire. In this respect the authors have addressed Scottish contactwith Maori on a limited level within the final chapter. However, until Morton andWilson’s Irish and Scottish Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 2013, the study of Scottishcontact with indigenous peoples has remained largely unexplored in global terms, letalone New Zealand, and is an area that probably requires more specialist research.

Nor are Scottish traits easily identifiable for the authors with the exception of theovert physical iconography of Scottish associationalism. Indeed, particularly appositeare the concluding lines of the book, albeit addressing the politics of New ZealandScots, but equally applicable to other aspects of Scots in New Zealand, that beyond a‘few key areas of distinction, it is difficult to discern much more apart from differencesvisible only at a very private and subtle level. And what could be more Scottish?’(p. 281).

To summarise, this is a work that helpfully brings the scattered scholarship ofNew Zealand’s Scots into one easily accessible volume. In addition, the authors havesuccessfully pioneered collaboration between scholars, local and amateur historiansand genealogists, tapping into the same public interest in ethnic origins that wasone of the catalysts for the project. Unfortunately this collaboration has been under-exploited and this first step has only scratched the surface of what has the potentialto be a valuable data source for the study of migrants both in New Zealand andelsewhere.

Iain Watson (The University of Edinburgh)

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Graeme Morton and David A. Wilson (eds), Irish and Scottish Encounters with IndigenousPeoples: Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia (Montreal and Kingston:McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 389. Paperback ISBN 978-0-7735-4151-1, $34.95).DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2014.0132

This edited collection arises from a conference held in Canada in 2010 on Scottishand Irish encounters with indigenous peoples. It features 15 chapters mainly fromhistorians, but also with contributions from those interested in literature, folklore,geography, and ethnography. Geographically, it is heavily weighted towards accountsconcerning North America (especially Canada), though Australia and New Zealandare covered in three chapters. It is relatively evenly balanced in considering Irish orScottish engagement, but focuses predominantly on nineteenth-century encounters.

A key theme throughout the volume is whether being Irish or Scottish influencedattitudes to indigenous peoples, including parallels and empathy as fellow victims ofcolonisation. Among those taking this line is Cian T. McMahon who examines Irishnationalists in the mid-nineteenth century who made connections between Ireland’sstruggle for independence with indigenous dispossession. Such affinities likewiseappear in Ann McGrath’s study of the descendants of Irish and Aboriginal people inAustralia. She argues that Irishness was seen in opposition to English superiority andenabled Australia’s indigenous history of oppression to be linked with a history – thatof the Irish – which was longer and ‘internationally known’. Brad Patterson’s chapteron Scottish-Maori encounters at Turakina in New Zealand also suggests harmony.In their chapter, Andrew Hinson and Graeme Morton explore the Revd. WilliamBell who was similarly sympathetic to Native Americans but critical of his Highlandbrethren. Their ultimate explanation for Bell’s views is that he did not see NativeAmericans as equal and needing to adhere to the same moral standards as his fellowScots.

Beverly Soloway and Marjory Harper in their respective pieces, albeit in diversetime periods, point to Scottish newcomers depending on the advice of indigenouspeoples. For fur traders in the eighteenth century this was essentially required to copewith the new environment, while for those Scots in the Hudson’s Bay Company in thetwentieth century Aboriginal people swapped goods, gave hunting advice, and actedas interpreters. Pádraig Ó Siadhail, in considering James Mooney and three otherIrish Catholic scholars working in Native American Studies in the later nineteenthcentury, concludes that their Irish Catholicism had little influence on their interestsin such scholarship.

By contrast with such depictions is Michael Newton’s work on Gaelic texts largelyemanating from Canada. In discussing hostility to First Nations peoples, Newtonpoints to the oppositions in Highland society in which Gaels were contrasted withnon-Gaels (Lowlanders, for instance, were considered inferior) and which informedtheir perceptions abroad. Newton’s key argument is that such depictions did notnecessarily portray real people, but operated as a rhetorical device to communicatea specific claim or idea. Apart from Newton, only Donald Harman Akenson, in hissweeping survey of the great European migration and indigenous peoples, deals with

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the less savoury side of such encounters, claiming that the long nineteenth centurywas ‘the greatest single period of land theft, cultural pillage, and casual genocide inworld history’.

If an emphasis on more sanitised approaches to such encounters is one drawbackto the volume, the absence of a comparative approach is another. The focus of thesechapters is either on the Scots and indigenous peoples or the Irish and indigenouspeoples. This hinders any conclusions being made about ethnic attitudes towards otherpeoples encountered. This lack of comparison extends to location with contributorslargely focusing on just one destination. David A. Wilson in his introduction attemptsto redress this and in doing so argues that destination rather than origin was morepertinent in determining migrant attitudes towards indigenous peoples. Perhaps. Butother variables were probably more influential including a migrant’s occupation andthe time period from which they wrote. I make this point in my own work on Irishand Scottish encounters with, and impressions of, Maori in New Zealand, which alsoshows that individual responses can alter over time.

Indeed, many of the contributors to this volume focus on individual perceptionsof indigenous peoples including Ó Siadhail on James Mooney, John Eastlake onJeremiah and Alma Curtin, Mark McGowan on Michael Power, Kevin Hutchings onJohn Buchan, Hinson and Morton on William Bell, and Michele Holmgren on LordEdward Fitzgerald, Thomas Moore, and Adam Kidd. It is therefore surprising to findno discussion of the broader benefits and pitfalls of biographical approaches and per-sonal perspectives. A further drawback is that, with some exceptions, several chaptersfail to situate their findings in a broader secondary literature. Finally, contributorsuse a range of terms for indigenous peoples including Native Americans, Indians,and Aborigines. But absent from the discussion is a key issue relating to indigeneitywhich differed in various parts of the British World: that of blood or affinity.

Despite some reservations, this is a volume which adds to our understanding ofScottish and Irish migration experiences. It points to the need for more work onencounters with indigenous peoples, including their views of the Irish and the Scots.Oral testimony is proposed as one methodology for this, but as Lachlan Paterson hasshown elsewhere, indigenous newspapers also offer insight. Crucially, however, weneed to extend the remit to include the various ways that the Scots and the Irish (andother migrants) encountered and were encountered by a range of peoples in diverselocations.

Angela McCarthy (University of Otago)

Iain J. M. Robertson, Landscapes of Protest in the Scottish Highlands after1914. The Later Highland Land Wars (Farnham, Surry: Ashgate Publishing Ltd,2013. Pp. x + 256. Hardback ISBN 978-1-4724-1137-2, £65.00).DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2014.0133

In March 1922, a group of increasingly frustrated cottars on Tiree wrote to the Boardof Agriculture for Scotland about their demands for land in visceral terms: ‘Whenthere was fighting to be done we had first chance to be shot; not your precious

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crofters. Likewise when the land is set out . . . we shall have first share of it, or therewill be trouble’ (p. 144). It is one of the strengths of this volume, and indicative of itsoriginal approach, that it breaks down the traditional polarities of modern Highlandsociety and offers a more complex and fluid picture of the nature and importance ofprotest in the Scottish Highlands and Islands from 1914.

In a field dominated by narrative histories, this volume tries to do somethingdifferent. Published in Ashgate’s studies in historical geography series, it sets out tomake a contribution to the theoretical and historiographical study of time, space andsociety in a generally neglected period of Highland history. Of course, Robertsonis not able – and perhaps does not want – to separate his study from the mountainsof decades of previous study; indeed, a large part of this work is an assessmentof that very literature, ranging from the fields of Highland history, social andeconomic change, and most importantly, to protest studies, the dominant theme of thebook.

The volume has been elaborately structured into three parts: a background, orhistoriographical assessment; a second part on ‘Highland Social Protest’; and lastly, atheoretical section on ‘Protesting Bodies.’ The overall aim is to examine the historicalgeography of rural social protest between the two world wars, a period which theauthor rightly identifies as enormously neglected in the Scottish, British and Irishcontexts. He identifies two main audiences for this work; students of the Highlandsand those of social protest. To this modest list might be added those interested in socialchange more widely and – topically – those interested in the impact of war on politicaland social change at home. Taken together, this book has the potential to build a betterunderstanding of a much neglected area: twentieth century crofting society fromboth ‘above’ and ‘below.’ As befits an essentially geographical approach, Robertsonis interested in the spaces in which resistance and protest took place, arguing that thelandscape is not simply a passive background to events, but part of the ‘lifescape’ and‘taskscape’ of the people who live there.

We begin with part one, which consists of two chapters giving a forensic overviewand analysis of the existing literature. This is very useful, and Robertson makesstrenuous efforts to stress his approach and aims throughout, but there is a lot towade through here. What is not in doubt is the author’s command of the literatureand his structural deftness and insight is valuable indeed.

Part two consists of three empirically informed chapters which detail thechronology and geography of land protests after 1914. The focus is what the authorcalls ‘protest performance’, which the author readily acknowledges as being informedby the land raids and agitation that took place before this date. We get detaileddefinitions of protest tactics (written threats to raid, the land raid, informal occupationof land), followed by a discussion of the geography of protest, its spatial distribution.Lastly, we consider the causes behind the protest phenomenon, placed into their widercontexts. Important here is the effect of recruitment for WWI and the experience ofveterans who came back, as well as responses to them. There is no doubt that themen who returned were often radicalised, and, as one ex-serviceman from Harrisput it, ‘Our dispositions are . . . changed somewhat since the war began and, I fear,we should never submit tamely to what our Forefathers did’ (p. 128). The author’s

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chief conclusion is that there was a complexity of causation, a combination of motiveswhich in turn often generated intra-community conflict.

This is one of the most interesting findings of Robertson’s research. He arguesthat factors once seen by historians as explanations for the unification of the crofting‘community’ actually functioned as points of conflict. Whether someone had carriedout war service or not became a bone of bitter contention in many Highlandand Island communities, as pressure on limited landed resources combined withlandowning obstruction and grindingly slow bureaucratic processes from the Boardof Agriculture for Scotland served to light the touch paper of local frustration.Robertson reminds us that ‘crofters’ were not a homogenous group pulled togetherby class consciousness; instead, he complicates the picture by building in generational,geographical, gender and class perspectives.

How successful is Robertson in meeting his wide ranging aims? Like all ambitiousbooks there are some areas of real strength and originality, and some which work lesswell. Having said that, new questions have been posed and discussed, and that is anachievement. One of the areas this reviewer would like to have seen more on were thethree case studies (Cheesebay, Harris; Rasaay and Park, Lewis), the author developedas micro-histories to illustrate the complexity and inner workings of his themes andapproaches. These were crammed into one chapter, and would have benefited frommore space. This also might have embedded them more securely into the rest of thebook, particularly the final chapter – and the most theoretically-driven – on ‘Spacingand dwelling: performing protest tasks in the crofting landscape.’ To give a rounderand deeper sense of this theoretical material, it might have been embedded into theempirical case studies, rather than sitting outside it.

Overall though, this is a challenging text for the reader and researcher in modernHighland history, which respectfully overturns and re-directs the old troupes of thefield to ask new questions and lay out future research directions.

Annie Tindley (University of Dundee)

Anna Ritchie (ed.), Historic Bute: Land and People (Edinburgh: Scottish Society ofNorthern Studies, 2012. Pp. ix + 162; illus, maps. Paperback ISBN 978-0-9535-2264-4, £12.96).DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2014.0134

Historic Bute: Land and People was published as an edited collection of papers given atthe Scottish Society of Northern Studies conference on Bute in 2010. The forewordto the collection defines it as a ‘happy complement’ (p. vii) to The ArchaeologicalLandscape of Bute (2010), which is indicative of the level of prior interest or knowledgeof Bute and its history that the volume presumes. But the result is a collection of essaysthat offers a sense of coherence and balance across time period and discipline, frompre-history to social history and historical geography.

One strength of the volume is the range of sources used by the authors. Theuse of mapping, map technology and GIS in the humanities is enjoying a surge ofpopularity at the moment, and Gilbert Márkus’ study of Norse and Gaelic place-

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names anchors the collection as the first contribution. Márkus makes a strong case forthe ‘Gaelicisation of Scandinavian settlers’ (p. 15), by navigating the reader through thetopography of Scotland’s earliest place-names. Despite acknowledging scant survivingsources, the author presents a convincing revision of existing academic arguments thatthe Norse did not settle on Bute; but, to the inexpert reader, the possibility that Norsesettlers abandoned Bute, rather than undergoing complex cultural assimilation, mayseem like an unanswered question.

Although Courtney Helen Buchanan concedes the difficulties of lacking evidencein her subsequent contribution, this hinders her overall argument in support ofScandinavian influence over Strathclyde’s economy and culture, especially whenhinged on the post-colonial theoretical concept of ‘Third Space’ and modernconceptualisations of multiculturalism. Barbara Crawford’s essay presents a morecohesive discussion of Norse influence over the west of Scotland. It is a helpful chapterthat puts the heated academic arguments and theories for interpreting colonialisminto context, suggesting to the reader that the Norse had no intention of settlingin Scotland after all. But, following the first two chapters, the reader is left witha nagging doubt as to who lived in Scotland before the eighth century – could therevival of Gaelic place-names in the 1200s be just that: a revival of the names thatwere current before the eighth century? There is much here that needs discussion andperhaps clarification – or a revision of the level of presumed knowledge required ofthe reader.

Ted Cowan’s discussion of the age of sagas begins: ‘it would be misleading tosuggest that Bute figures prominently in the Icelandic sagas’ (p. 49). It could have beena refreshing contribution to this volume: Bute was of some importance, but nothingdramatic; Bute had some use to a conquering nation, but was eminently dispensablecompared to the rich pickings of Irish monasteries. The evidentiary possibilities ofliterary sources for historical research have, traditionally, been overlooked – so, fromthis perspective, it is an encouraging inclusion here. In a similar fashion, Bute does notresonate highly in the history of the cult of St Kentigern. Instead, Tom Turpie’s essayoffers a consideration of a historical figure left on the sidelines when faced with strongcompetition as the cult of saints evolved in Scotland over the medieval period. LizanneHenderson’s contribution on the witches of Bute is also a study of the localised natureof belief in medieval and early modern Scotland. Henderson considers the prospect ofa highland/lowland divide in witch-belief and witch-hunting, concluding that therewas ‘very little that was particularly unique or distinctive’ (p. 153). No mention ismade of why Jonet McNicol returned to Bute in 1673, having managed to flee whensentenced to death for witchcraft in 1662. If this indicative of the problematic natureof early modern institutional records, the author bypasses an opportunity to addressthis methodological issue and to relieve the reader’s curiosity.

The Bute mazer is discussed in the chapter by David Caldwell and GeorgeDalgliesh, and complemented by Molly Rourke’s examination of the term itself. Thepresence of a lion couchant rather than a lion rampant instantly grabs the reader’sattention – and without knowing exactly when this part of the vessel was designedand created, it is a dominant curiosity. We are told that the lion and the shields aroundhim are on a lid that was part of another bowl. A lion couchant would certainly make

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a solid handle of a lid to grasp. To the inexpert reader, it is an unanswered questionthat, nonetheless, piques attention to the significance of this marvellous artifact formedieval Scottish politics, beyond the history of Bute.

Richard Oram’s ‘Frontierland’ chapter is a highlight of the volume. The use ofdendrochronology to tie environmental history with social history is well-executedand convincing. By using weather and climate data as a route into Scotland’s ‘miniice age’, it is one of the few chapters in the volume that shows how a micro-historycan contribute to a national history with international implications. Oram’s chaptercontextualises the two following contributions by Angus Hannah and George Geddes,leaving the reader with a greater understanding of what it was like to live on theland by detailing the maps of the fields, the dwellings and the ‘improvements’ ofthe eighteenth century. Although Oram suggests that Bute was relatively fortunate interms of climate, this is not an isolationist study, and the volume is improved by theauthor’s approach.

Historic Bute benefits from quality contributors and research. Although a slimvolume, there is a breadth of subject that also advocates the methodological benefitsof micro-history. But what is more ambitious, if unintentional, is the unansweredquestions that the essays raise as a collective. It does the discipline of Scottish historya great disservice to suggest that research and scholarship relating to Scotland’s past issomehow justified for its own sake. ‘With a pivotal position in the Firth of Clyde, Butecommands sea-routes into and out of much of inland Argyll, west-central Scotlandand beyond’ (p. vii). The micro-history has a valuable place in historical scholarship,but Scotland did not exist in a political, economic or cultural vacuum. This is impliedby the theme of Norse and Scandinavian cultural exchange that looms large in thiscollection, but Scotland’s witch-hunt was notable for its severity and longevity withina European context, and agricultural improvement as a reaction to demographicchange in the age of enlightenment was not just a Scottish phenomenon.

Volumes such as this present a distinct opportunity to situate Scottish history withinbroader European scholarship, and a move away from doing Scottish history simplyfor Scottish history’s sake. That does not seem to be the intention here, suggesting anopportunity for future research on the Isles – including Bute.

Harriet Cornell (University of Edinburgh)

T.C. Smout and Mairi Stewart, The Firth of Forth, An Environmental History (Malta:Gutenberg Press, 2012. Pp. xiv + 306; illus. Paperback ISBN 978-1-7802-7064-7,£14.99).DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2014.0135

The history of rivers has always been a prominent sub-genre in environmental history,ranging from Marc Cioch’s The Rhine: an Eco-Biography (2006) to A Story of SixRivers by Peter Coates (2013). European interest in such things was undoubtedlystimulated by Richard Hoffmann’s hugely influential 1996 article in The AmericanHistorical Review, ‘Economic Development and Aquatic Ecosystems in MedievalEurope’, and in 2000 Paulo Squatriti edited an important volume on water resources

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and technology, Working with Water in Medieval Europe. To this list we should addthe journal Water History, first issued in 2009, which has recently carried a specialedition on the Danube (2013). So the current volume under review is part of anenvironmental trend towards investigating a part of Nature that has always beenessential to the human condition.

At face value this book is a welcome addition to the existing corpus of literature. Ineleven thematic chapters, ranging from the Mesolithic through to Herring booms, andon to the ‘problems’ caused by seals, the two authors have clearly undertaken a hugeamount of research and their findings are explained in an erudite manner. Indeed,much of what they uncover is horrific (like the scatters of tomato seeds on old sewageplumes) and a testament to long-term human mis-management. This reviewer forone will never quite look on the River Forth downstream of Stirling in the same way.Particularly welcome are Professor Smout’s chapters on the bird life of the Bass Rockand the Isle of May. As a keen ornithologist and observer it might be expected thathis research would be illuminating and he does not disappoint the reader. The bookitself is generally well presented with some excellent plates, but what happened to thebibliography? A short guide to further reading and telling readers to check endnotesdoes not fill an obviously yawning information gap.

But this book has more serious faults. Clearly, the most important of these is thealmost total dominance of the post-1700 period throughout the whole tome. This isa likely reflection of the interests of the authors. While pre-history is largely addressedin the first chapter, medievals are virtually ignored. By my count only about nine orso pages of text (pp. 26–30; pp. 203–05; pp. 228–30) discuss the medieval period andeven then only perfunctorily – approximately 800 years of the Forth’s environmentalhistory is essentially ignored. It might also be added that this was also a period ofknown climatic change that people living near to and working around the river wouldlikely have had to adapt to in the longer term and in a wetter climate.

A prime example of this dearth of medieval commentary is the small section onthe anadromous Salmo salar (Atlantic salmon). While the authors mention the fixedtrap at Craigforth above Stirling and inform us that it had been there since medievaltimes, there is no recognition that the current visible concrete remains of the trapwith its single box are just the most recent iteration of a much older structure thatonce would have looked much different. Nor was it the only fixed medieval traplocated there. Indeed, had they looked at the 1318 royal legislation concerning fishtraps they might have realised why such structures were precisely located close tothe high tide marks on Scottish river systems, while even earlier twelfth centurylegislation could have explained why all the traps in these constructions were a specificsize.

Medieval Scottish legislative (and actual) efforts to protect the environments oftheir rivers, together with the fish that swam in them and the molluscs that livedin them, were highly advanced and varied in the wider European context – theyhad to be given competing royal, baronial, and ecclesiastic interests and the sheervolumes of people employed in the fishing industries. Had the authors consulted, forexample, the records of Cambuskenneth Abbey, Stirling burgh, and the Erskine familyabout the medieval fisheries on the Forth they might have told a quite different story.

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In the same vein, where is the discussion about Anguilla anguilla (European eel) andthe specialist traps employed in those fisheries? Despite its general excellence, thechapter on pollution can also be faulted. Though the authors rightly bring attentionto the depredations of Lord Kames and the environmental impacts that his clearance ofFlanders Moss had on the river, nowhere is there mention of the earlier documentedbog bursts that also deposited similar material in the river system and which mightalso have affected the local industries centered around molluscs.

For medievalists then, there is a lot missing from this book, ranging from activemanagement of the Forth’s salt grass water meadows, through the formation ofnew islands that were instantly claimed by precocious landlords for their herds, toearly pollution from the mining and brewing industries. Such a litany of omission,however, would unnecessarily detract from what is an otherwise excellent book. Themain problem with The Firth of Forth, An Environmental History is that it has beenwrongly packaged. It is not an environmental history of the River Forth but a superbenvironmental history of the River Forth, c.1700 to the present day. As far as theenvironmental history of this river and its catchment area is concerned, there stillremains a lot of research to undertake and a large gap to fill.

Alasdair Ross (University of Stirling)

John Flint and John Kelly (eds), Bigotry, Football and Scotland (Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press, 2013. Pp. 232. Paperback IBSN 978-0-7486-7037-6, £19.99).DOI: 10.3366/jshs.2014.0136

Sectarianism in Scotland has become an accepted political and cultural discourseover the last fifteen years. Whereby sectarianism was once facilitated, aspects suchas: MacMillan’s ‘Scotland’s Shame’ lecture, the creation of anti-sectarian charitiessuch as ‘Nil by Mouth’, and new political initiatives (e.g. shared campuses and theanti-sectarian legislation introduced by the SNP in 2011), have seen debates overwhat constitutes sectarian bigotry at least enter the public domain. Related to thiswider discussion, sectarianism in Scottish sport is not an ignored or isolated concept.However, in more recent works it has formed parts of wider studies into isolatedparts of sport including studies into individual football clubs. Bigotry, Football andScotland has, as its central aim, improving the understanding of sectarianism in Scotlandthrough the context of football. Previous works on the subject of sectarianismitself have, in the opinion of the authors, been crippled through pervasive publicdiscourse (particularly through the media) and reluctance to investigate the subject ina comprehensive manner e.g. lack of context used when examining sectarian divisionin Scotland.

Flint and Kelly achieve a wide and varied discourse on the subject with movesoutside the usual spheres. For example, Rosie attempts to describe and disseminate thetumultuous and controversial events from the 2011–12 SPL season (one of the mostcontroversial in recent times) from out with a Celtic or Rangers standpoint (althoughmore analysis of non-Celtic/Rangers supporters’ views on sectarianism, or indeedtheir own forms of bigotry, would have further enhanced this particular chapter).

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Kelly also successfully analyses the notion that football bigotry is only confined tothe west of Scotland with particular focus on the complex and contradictory natureof the (somewhat) sectarian Heart of Midlothian/Hibernian rivalry in Edinburgh.Kelly notes how their rivalry spills into sectarian bigotry against each other, andagainst Celtic or Rangers, in spite of repeated protestations from Hibs/Heartssupporters that sectarian characteristics are largely absent within their fan personas andrivalries.

Reid presents an interesting argument attempting to prove that the mass sportsmedia contribute to the ‘ethno-religious bigotry that is Scotland’s national demon’,and that this reflects their distaste for more informed sociological analysis. The thesis,while interesting, stretches the evidence available somewhat, although the example ofNeil Lennon of Celtic F.C. is used as an effective case study of the argument. Theauthor claims to use critical discourse analysis in order to bring out the politicallybiased nature of media reports. Personalisation threw a screen up, Reid implies, toprotect a wider examination of Scotland’s ‘ethno-religious demons’.

Reid’s essay is complemented by Hamilton-Smith and McArdle’s comprehensiveessay on the botched and confused attempt to deal with sectarianism through theSNP’s ‘Offensive Behaviour’ Act (2011). The authors note that the Act was possiblythe response political, and even some judicial, figures were eager for in terms ofeffecting change when dealing with sectarian offences i.e. heavier sentences given tooffenders. Nevertheless, it is also noted that, given the lack of consistency in applyingthis act, a bigger issue is how much the media can direct judicial interpretations of thelaw as well as directing public and political discourse on the subject.

Goodall and Mallock also succeed in widening the terms of the debate with amuch-needed analysis of how women in local communities are affected by what isroutinely neglected by traditional accounts of sectarianism as a male preserve. Thelegal framework portrays sectarianism as a young, drunk, working-class male preservewhere public disorder is the focus of the 2012 Act, offering nothing to protect womenfrom domestic violence associated with the bigotry tied to this demographic especiallyprevalent on football days.

Some of the historical references are also useful with Davies’ excellent chapterthat delves, not just into the Celtic-Rangers rivalry (both on and off the pitch) butalso, into social disorder, gang warfare, and sectarian division in Glasgow in the early20th century. The chapter investigates the revolving membership of gangs in Glasgow(membership that switched to religious from geographical on certain match-days).Davies expertly investigates the ensuing court case controversies with some gangmembers who subsequently found themselves elevated to the status of minor celebrityfor their role in anti-social behaviour. Bradley also presents an interesting analysis ofthe complex but important relationship between perceptions of history and memoryand football supporters. A topic that could almost have been the subject of a separatework in itself, Bradley puts forward a spirited and noteworthy case on behalf of clubfans (in particular Rangers and Celtic) retaining and maintaining cultural, social, andpolitical significances within their respective ‘terrace’ personas.

Football supporters themselves also provide a welcome examination intosectarianism and their respective clubs. Co-founder of the Ranger’s Standard website

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Book Reviews

Alastair McKillop offers a glimpse of how a supporter constructs the issues reflectedin the book’s title. McKillop also provides an interesting discussion on the contrastsand differences in the roles of the Catholic Church and the Church of Scotland inhow they reacted to it. The impact of the internet in perpetuating division is alsoinsightfully narrated as well as quantifying the effect of the generational differencein what sectarianism means. Alternatively, Celtic supporter Patrick McVey espouses amuch more concise viewpoint with the position that Rangers and Celtic football clubsbenefit financially from sectarianism. While money holds the football establishmentin position, then the sense of belonging is exploited even whilst the clubs deny thattheir rivalry (and individual makeup) is sectarian.

An intellectual debate on the culture and make up of sectarianism also providesinteresting sections. While Davis tries to debunk sectarianism as anything otherthan a ‘spiteful aggression’ based on grudge and pique (with the SNP’s legislationfully warranted as it protects from hateful speech), counter-intuitively Waiton’s viewis that anti-sectarianism represents ‘intolerance tolerance’. He claims it contradictswestern notions from Mill on liberal tolerance. Today’s tolerance, he argues, isdegraded and based on the presumption of vulnerability. Consequently, this ‘caringauthoritarianism’ has begun to characterise Scotland, emanating as it does from ‘thepolitical elite’.

Governance’s role and sectarian bigotry are also successfully tackled within thebook. Flint and Powell analyse attempts by the state to homogenise the masses,particularly from a viewpoint of supporting the military and military action takenby the state. The piece investigates the use of military remembrance, such asRemembrance Sunday, and its relationship to football, as a means of analysingfurther sectarian bigotry within the sport. Crawford’s fascinating analysis advancesthe argument that a wider political agenda is served through apparent anti-sectarianofficial policy. Drawing upon the theories of Bourdieu and Wacquant a ‘neo-liberal Leviathan’ designed to cause a ‘Centaur state’ and maintain class is the truepurpose he claims. Football support is being engineered towards being a ‘middle-class’consumption item and the 2012 Act was designed to secure this project of civilisationaway from ‘collective identity’ towards the corporate where new behavioural normsare imposed on the poor. While the argument is coherent, the extent to which it issupported by empirical sources is questionable.

Flint and Kelly have opened a ‘new front’ through this new, novel work onsectarian bigotry. This work, and its wide, diverse scope is a commendable andvaluable contribution to analysing one of Scotland’s historic problems. The termsof the debate on sectarianism will hopefully have been shifted to a more prevalent,relevant, and substantial basis.

Sean Huddleston and Chris Holligan (University of the West of Scotland)

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Andrew C. Holman and Robert B. Kristofferson (eds), More of a Man: Diaries of a Scottish Craftsman...

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Transcript of Andrew C. Holman and Robert B. Kristofferson (eds), More of a Man: Diaries of a Scottish Craftsman...