'Argyll 1730-1850' is a systematic account of what happened in Argyll in the period, starting in the 1730s, when the county’s old social and agricultural order was overturned by its landowners.
In this thoroughly researched, comprehensive and instantly accessible book, Robert McGeachy tells the story of a revolution – one that would extend to the rest of the Highlands and Islands – set in train when Argyll’s leading families, Campbells always prominent among them, turned their backs on clanship and embraced an explicitly capitalist approach to the management of their estates.
Robert McGeachy’s sympathies lie with the victims of this revolution – men and women whose communities fell apart as the pace of landlord-induced change accelerated. But for all that those people suffered because of what was done to them, they did not suffer passively. If Argyll’s lairds were at the forefront of modernising – as they saw it – Highlands and Islands society, the generality of Argyll’s population were in the vanguard of organising resistance to the new order. Their fightback, as Robert McGeachy shows conclusively, was both more widespread and more effective than generally tends to be thought.
'Argyll 1730-1850' also examines what is to be learned of social upheaval from folk belief; quarrying, mining and the beginnings of industrialisation; Argyll men’s increasing participation in the British military; official hostility to Gaelic; and just about everything, in fact, that helped to make Argyll, by the mid-nineteenth century, so radically different from the Argyll of a hundred years before.
Contents:
Foreword
Maps
Introduction
1. The Traditional Agrarian Structure
2. Tenurial Reorganistion and Early Improvement
3. The Transformation of the Agrarian System
4. The Significance of Kelping
5. Agrarian Change and Resistance
6. The Forty-Five in Argyll and Residual Jacobitism
7. Cultural Change and Oppression
8. Enterprise and Early Argyllshire Trading Companies
9. The Development of Trade and Industry
10. Planned Villages and the Fishing Industry
11. Smuggling and Illicit Distilling
12. Changing Community and Defence of Community
13. Argyllshire Regiments, the Navy and Resistance to Recruitment
14. Clearance, Emigration and Migration 1730-1820
15. Clearance, Emigration and Migration 1820-1850
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Glossary
Bibliography
Notes
Index
