Ireland, radicalism, and the Scottish Highlands, c. 1870-1912

This is a balanced and vivid account of a turbulent period of modern Scottish history.

Making an important contribution to the historiography of the Highland land agitation of the 1870s onwards, this book considers the nature of Irish involvement in the Highland 'Crofters' War', examining the competing claims of various land reform movements for the consideration of the crofters, and highlighting the heterogeneous nature of Irish nationalism in the 1880s.

Although a malign Irish presence in the Highlands and Islands was noted by contemporaries, and has been stressed by later historians and commentators, this work situates any direct Irish role within a general social reform movement, a movement which attempted to encompass the whole of Britain and Ireland.

The direct Irish presence in the Highlands came not from Ireland itself, or via the official 'Parnellite' Irish nationalists of Westminster, but from a group of Glasgow-based reformers, based around the city's branch of the Irish Land League but containing a large proportion of migrant Highlanders and other radical Scots.Where the 'Crofters' War' has often been perceived as a regional extension of the Irish Land War, the Irish influence in the Highlands should instead ensure that it is treated as an early manifestation of the 'single tax' or 'land restoration' movement which played a major role in British politics in the first decade of the twentieth century.

In order to set this context, the final chapter deals with the period between 1895 and the Great War, following the radical threads of the 1880s as they gradually disentangled.