ANDREW G. NEWBY. Ireland, Radicalism and the Scottish Highlands, c. 1870-1912. (Scottish Historical Review Monographs, number 15.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2007. Pp. vii, 224. $75.00

Abstract

As the existence of a well-attended conference held at the University of Hertfordshire in 2005 suggests, the topic of the possession, distribution, and cultural meaning of land in Britain has taken on new life recently. Historians of land reform movements in Wales, Scotland, England, and Ireland have begun to envision their topics as interrelated, part of an impulse toward broader landownership and a natural right to the soil that did not discriminate on the basis of heritage or language. Andrew G. Newby firmly situates his study within this school, describing land reform in the Scottish Highlands in the late nineteenth century not as an enthusiasm of deprived rural people, but as just one part of a multifaceted, sophisticated, and international radical movement. Newby's book has two main goals. His first—at which he completely succeeds—is to evaluate the extent of Irish involvement in the agitation to reform landholding in Scotland between the 1870s and the early decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on newspapers and personal correspondence, he traces the interpenetration of the staff of the Irish nationalist movement into the Scottish highlands, and their involvement with Glasgow reformers.