By the late nineteenth century much of the British Isles was converting inexorably into a mature industrial and urbanized society. Britain became the unrivalled commercial power, and most of its people were beginning to reap the benefits of rising living standards and security (although much of life remained cruel by later standards). There remained parts that were little touched by industrialization and remained locked in rural deprivation. In such regions rising anger was concentrated against the social system that seemed to hold them in permanent poverty and oppression. Rural poverty, the land question, and the landlord monopoly consumed a disproportionate share of political attention and, of course, fed the greatest of all the controversies, the Home Rule for Ireland question. Rural radicalism was found in many parts of England but was much more vociferous in what London regarded as “the periphery”—in Wales, more so in the Scottish Highlands, and most of all in Ireland. Ireland and the Scottish Highlands had experienced recurrent destitution, negative landlordism, and continuing rural squalor. They both contained large populations still dependent on preindustrial conditions; they both scoured the recent and distant past for the origins of their relative deprivation, and they both searched for radical panaceas. There seemed to be a spontaneous confluence of Irish and Highland interests. In both places the central question was, who should control the land?

Some of the Irish radicals of the 1870s and 1880s dreamed of a pan-Celtic movement, which would combine to revolutionize the foundations of landholding across the British Isles. There were, indeed, recurrent links among the parts, especially between Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. Radical ideas, it was often said, were spread by fishing crews operating in the Irish Sea. Michael Davitt famously toured both places (as well as the United States and Australia) and strove to unite opinion for broad political purposes. It was a turbulent time, and the currents of ideas and influence were extraordinarily complicated and changeable. In Scotland there was recurrent denunciation of the infection of Irish ideas among the Highlanders, perhaps precipitating and fueling the Crofters’ War of the 1880s in which the smallholders attempted to wrest much better conditions from their landlords. Some of the radicals saw the Highlands as fertile ground for the trial of their ideas, especially when they were not making sustained headway in Ireland. Queen Victoria herself believed that Irish ideas were poisoning the minds of her otherwise blessed Highlanders.

Andrew Newby of Edinburgh University takes up the question and unravels the twisted skeins of connection between Ireland and the Highlands in an effort to measure the strength of the affiliation. It is a convoluted story, which requires close attention. Newby's central question is whether the upsurge in radical reform activity among the Scottish Highlanders from the 1870s was a self-generated phenomenon with its own objectives and dynamics or simply an extension of the great Irish movement. His answer takes the form of an intricate, ball-by-ball commentary over three decades, mainly derived from newspaper reports, notably from the columns of the Oban Times. He shows the early importance of the immigrant population of urban Highlanders in Glasgow, who certainly worked with the Irish radicals. It is clear that the Irish and Highland elements in the Glasgow population were much more politicized than the Highlanders in the north. They aspired toward a “general British radical agenda” (14) and even a “pan-Celtic consciousness” (151).

Nevertheless, despite recurrent talk of Celtic solidarity and attempts to use the Highlanders as a launching pad for the ideas of Henry George, the Highlanders tended to follow their own paths and, for the most part, resisted ideas of land nationalization, Georgism, socialism, nationalism, and other brands of Irish radicalism. There were fears of Irish radicals appropriating the Highlanders’ own struggles for wider purposes in which the Highlanders did not necessarily concur. There were moments when pan-Celtic rhetoric colored the debates, but ultimately, says Newby, the idea was “a red herring,” mainly attractive to American supporters and much exaggerated by their correspondents (195–96).

Consequently we are left with the question of what fueled the unpredicted conflagration of the crofters in the 1880s. Newby argues persuasively that greater credit should be accorded to the influence and political articulation achieved within the Highlands and among its own leaders. The Highlanders aroused an astonishing determination to resist further evictions; they mounted widely based campaigns to regain lost lands; they sustained a substantial record of sporadic low-level violence and incendiarism, and they developed the effective technique of land-raiding rent strikes. All this was highly localized within the Highland context. It is clear that Irish radicals took great heart from the Highland agitation when their own fires seemed to subside (190–91). But Highland aspirations were not identical with those of the Irish. There was considerable “Hibernophobia” in Scotland (15), and most Highland reformers and agitators were afraid of being tarred with the brush of Irish radicalism.

None of the paths in the political debates were straightforward; they twisted and turned upon themselves, and Newby does well to disentangle the alliances and ideas. Partisan interpretations of Highland history, as well as antiemigration sentiment, were pervasive in the crofter debates, and the Highland case was powerfully influenced by warm memories of the Clearances. “How a land should be owned to retain about it the largest rural population is the gist of the reform wanted,” said the Oban Times as early as February 1873 (24), and this implied a rejection of the forces of proletarianization, which always seemed to threaten the crofter population. The demonization of the landlords was a consistent element throughout, and much of the historical and moral case was conceded in the legislation of the Crofters’ Act in 1887, which established a special status for the crofters. The historical argument undoubtedly influenced Gladstone, and a line of continuity can be traced from these debates to Lloyd George's identification of land as a basis for state revenue in 1909 and after 1913 (180).

Often, the Highland debate descended into dissension, and the land question became confused with Disestablishmentarianism, the Temperance movement, and Home Rule issues. Land restoration ideas were most often based on historical claims about the moral basis of land occupation. The underlying question was why indeed the Highlands were so poor and why the region was losing its youth by out-migration. In the outcome, the Irish connection was not well sustained, and the Highlands followed a different path set by the crofter legislation in the late 1880s.

Newby provides an important new anatomy of these otherwise confusing movements and their outcomes in the Highland context. For nonspecialist readers he might have provided a broader context for the debates, especially the social and economic conditions of the rural regions such as the Highlands in the late nineteenth century; he could have explained more abut the organization (or otherwise) of political pressures among the lairds and the opponents of change in the north of Scotland, and he might have reached further into the minds of the crofters at large (i.e., beyond the newspaper reports). The main story is now much less tangled, and Newby has notably disengaged the Irish elements from the mystery of the crofter resurgence in the late nineteenth-century Highlands.