3 Review(s)

This book probes the deep-rooted links between the land, the people and the religious culture of the Scottish Highlands and Islands in the nineteenth century. The responses of the clergy to the social crisis which enveloped the region have often been characterised as a mixture of callous indifference, cowering deference or fatalistic passivity. Allan MacCollOCOs pioneering research challenges such stereotypical representations of Highland ministers head-on. Land, Faith and the Crofting Community is the first full-scale examination of Christian social teaching in the nineteenth-century Gaidhealtachd and addresses a major gap in the historical understanding of Gaelic society. Seeking to lay bare the existing myths by a wide-ranging analysis of all the denominational, theological and social factors at play, this study boldly overturns the received scholarly and popular interpretations. A ground-breaking work, it explores a substantial but under-utilised field of evidence and questions whether or not Highland Christians OCo both clergy and laity OCo were committed to land reform as an engine of social improvement and conciliation.