James Hunter has written a remarkable book for the Associated Clan MacLeod Societies. Professor Hunter is a distinguished historian of the modern history of the Scottish Highlands (his first book, The Making of the Crofting Community, based on his doctoral thesis, was published in 1976 and is still in print). He has played an important part in the public life of the Scottish Highlands, initially as first director of the Scottish Crofters Union and more recently as chair of the UK government's Highlands and Islands Enterprise from 1998 to 2004. He is now director of the Centre for History at the University of the Highlands and Islands Millennium Institute. Throughout his career he has worked in the public sphere rather than in an exclusively academic environment. In Scottish Exodus he attempts to grapple with the complex issues of authority and identity involved in any history of human migration. To do this he adopts a fascinating interdisciplinary approach, drawing on the insights offered by the Canadian novelist Alistair MacLeod and the American social anthropologist Celeste Ray as well as that of folklorists, Scottish Gaelic poets, and the remarkable amount of historical scholarship on the history of the Scottish Highlands published in the last two decades. Inevitably, the perspective presented in the book is that of a Scot, a Highland Scot with capital letters at the beginning of each word, seeking to understand the interest of foreigners in the history of the Scottish Highlands and of Scotland. He argues that “the Scottish diaspora is entitled to have, and to celebrate, identities that are the diaspora's own, not ours [in Scotland]” (25). He concedes that “Scotland's relationship with its overseas diaspora” has been “anything but easy” (14). “It is their collective behaviours, as can be seen from the Scottish media's treatment of New York's annual Tartan Day parade, we find mystifying or, worse, embarrassing. Hence Scotland's failure to mobilise its diaspora, as Ireland, in contrast, has done brilliantly—in support of national causes that could do with international backing” (14). It is to Hunter's great credit that he grasped the opportunity presented by the commission that has resulted in the publication of this book to use the contacts offered through the Associated Clan MacLeod Societies to explore the world in search of the Scottish diaspora.

Until the British Empire came to an end in the years after the Second World War, there had been little interest in Scotland in the history of Scots who had emigrated from the country or their descendants. To emigrate from Scotland was to exit from Scottish History, perhaps to become part of the history of the empire, or worse, to become “foreign” by ceasing to be British. In one of the most moving sections of the book, Hunter writes in conclusion (310): “From the perspective of countries like Australia or the US, the arrivals of thousands of men, women and children from the Highlands and Islands constituted a huge gain in human capital. But from a Scottish standpoint, the opposite is true. To us, the people who left represent a great loss.”

My perspective is different. I am a U.S. citizen who is the grandson of Scottish immigrants to Philadelphia who now lectures in Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh. I cannot present myself as ethnically pure in a Scottish context (like most Americans, my ethnic background is diverse), but I have a Scottish name that meant that I could not ignore Scotland and its culture, no matter how small the country. Hunter's book is peppered with the individual family histories of people like me (most of them with MacLeod as their surname, including those from Australian aboriginal or African-American backgrounds). Thus in Hunter's book the past, or history itself, is in constant dialogue with the present through the testimony of his Associated Clan MacLeod Societies informants.

The original intention of the Associated Clan MacLeod Societies was that this book be entitled The MacLeods: The Migration of a Clan, and that its publication complement the publication in 1959 of The MacLeods: The History of a Clan by I. F. Grant, a considerable authority on Scottish Highland history and culture in her own generation. The change in title reflects the manner in which highlanders made sense of the emigration that became so central to their culture in the nineteenth century by appeal to Old Testament tradition and the hope that the Gael would find refuge from their oppression by the modern equivalent of the Egyptians in a distant promised land. This is part of what is at the root of the paradoxes of the legacy of Scottish emigration. Highlanders were not taken from their homes to be oppressed in a foreign land. They were driven from it by their own chiefs, in the name of economic modernization. The landowning class in Ireland in the nineteenth century that betrayed their people could be seen as English absentees (though not all of them were and not all of them betrayed their people). Thus emigrants from Scotland and their descendants, particularly from the Scottish Highlands, often identify with clan and kin rather than a Scottish nation.

James Hunter concludes his book by discussing the impact of the modern Scottish Parliament on land policy in the Scottish Highlands, including the future of the MacLeod estate and Dunvegan Castle on Skye. His cause is community ownership of the land as a radical departure from the Scottish tradition of powerful individual landowners. Why not see the land itself rather than Dunvegan Castle as the embodiment of the promised land? In Ireland the stately homes of the Ascendancy landowners are now largely neglected ruins. For Hunter, the answer is clear (312): “Age-old barriers of distance and remoteness—barriers which the Highlands and Islands once found insurmountable—are starting to break down. Internationally, leading companies are increasingly located in places where their owners and workforces can simultaneously earn a good living and have access to natural environments of the highest quality.” If this vision becomes reality, it will not be prosperous MacLeods from overseas who bring it about. Hunter mentions that employers in the Scottish Highlands today are “reliant on workers recruited in countries like Poland, Latvia and Croatia” (311). These are people who have come to a land of opportunity but will never forget their origins and will want their children to share their sense of identity in their new home and memory of their old country, and as part of that process, the Scottish Highlands as we have understood it will become a different place.