David W. Moore has had a good idea. No one (except an archaeologist or two) has surveyed the other British Isles—the Channel Islands, Wight, Scilly, Anglesey, Man, the Hebrides, Orkney, and Shetland—in one volume. Moore looks at the human history of all of them, from the fifth millennium BC (in the Channel Islands) until the census of 2001. Mastering so many sources—Bede, the Mabinogian, nineteenth-century travelers, and County Council reports—is not a simple task, and Moore has made a good job of it. I see hints that he has visited the communities he writes about as well.

At first sight the island groups seem impossibly various. The Isle of Wight contains 132,000 souls, for instance, and Scilly a mere 2,000. But a close look at the population figures in 1801—Moore presents them in a couple of appendices—shows that things have changed during the past two centuries. In that year most of the places dealt with had populations of 20,000–35,000. They were all, of course, agricultural communities, with more or less intense fishing activities. Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea of the 1820s in Guernsey cannot have been very different from their contemporaries in Lewis, in essentials.

There were, of course, huge differences in the islands’ polities. For all that we hear about the position of the Northern Isles at the crossroads of Viking activity, they remained poor communities from first until fairly recently. The potentates of Anglesey and Man were very different from the smallish fry who operated in the far north. And as the population figures (and climate statistics) show, there was scope for far more long-lasting change in the south. Shetland will never become an “island suburb and garden park retreat for the comfortably retired” (208), thank goodness.

The islands have taken different routes toward modernity. Moore deals efficiently with their economic histories during the past two centuries: Man's industrial developments, the impact of the Smith family in Scilly, crofting history in the Western Isles, Orkney and kelp, and Shetland's bitter experience of truck. There is good material too on the Second World War, which afflicted all our isles in poignant ways, not least the Channel Islands.

With a wealth of detail, Moore brings out the cultural differences between his communities. The Western and Northern isles had a similar political history, but culturally they are as different as can be. “The difference,” wrote Hugh MacDiarmid in 1937, perhaps unfairly, “is between islands with a cultural background [the Hebrides] and islands with none—a delightful people, interested in music, dancing, subtleties of speech and spiritual things, and a boorish people with no more intellectual interests or spiritual perceptions than their own grice” (Laurence Graham and Brian Smith, eds., MacDiarmid in Shetland [Lerwick, 1992], 53–54).

Moore is never so outrageously simplistic, of course. But he occasionally gives an impression that some of his modern island communities are self-satisfied and reactionary. Discussing Wight, he asks, whose island is it? and seems to conclude that it is nothing but a Tory haven. No doubt Wight's population is aged and comfortable. But the 103-year-old Marxist novelist Edward Upward has lived there for many years. There are surprises in every community.

It is inevitable, in a large enterprise like this, that there are errors and oddities of interpretation. Moore tends to follow the modern school of British archaeology, which imagines that almost every development was peaceful. Thus, he regards the brochs of northern Scotland as houses rather than fortalices and cannot conceive that the Vikings indulged in much bloodshed in the isles. He imagines that the old and new editions of Thomson's fine history of Orkney are by different authors. But in general he is accurate and careful and assists readers with clear maps and statistics. Best of all, he writes clearly. The Other British Isles is a sound piece of work.