For generations, the modern history of Gaelic Scotland and its people impinged little on Scottish or British historiography. From the 1970s, Jim Hunter's E. P. Thompson-inspired ‘history from below’, Eric Richards’ detailed accounts of the Highland Clearances and, later, the historic-geographical approach of Charles Withers, helped to raise the region's profile to the extent that in 1994 R. H. Campbell published an article entitled ‘Too Much on the Highlands: A Plea for Change’. Despite this plea, local and thematic studies, and works that place the Highlands in a comparative political, social or cultural context, have continued to refine our understanding of Gáidhealtachd history. Iain Robertson's new contribution, however, helps to fill a notable lacuna. A well theorised and cogently argued contribution to Scottish social history and more general protest studies, Robertson notes that (227) the book was born ‘out of the realisation that we have not paid sufficient attention to land disturbances in the Highlands of Scotland after 1914 when compared to that given to earlier events’.

In many respects, Landscapes of Protest is testament to an increasingly sophisticated interdisciplinary turn that interrogates traditional historical narratives. Employing methods from historical geography, memory studies and sociology, Robertson scrutinises various elements of the early twentieth-century land wars in the Hebrides. He uses a voluminous amount of manuscript sources, but supplements these with oral testimony based on interviews which in themselves will become source material for subsequent generations. The first section of the book, presented as ‘background’ to the main thesis, doubles as an extremely useful historiographical synthesis of existing scholarship on the events surrounding the Highland Land Question, particularly in terms of constructing models of tenant resistance to landlord authority.

Landscapes of Protest raises interesting questions about the heterogeneity of the Gáidhealtachd, and it succeeds in presenting a general picture from a microhistorical starting point. Robertson addresses two main audiences: historians of the Scottish Highlands and historians of social protest movements. Despite the author's own concerns (14) about pursuing a structure that might please both audiences at the expense of narrative coherence, this approach generally succeeds. Robertson also makes convincing claims about the spatial element of protest, based on the ‘truism’ that ‘space matters’ (176). The adoption of the ‘taskscape’ concept (4) from Tim Ingold's anthropological work, and more recently used by Katrina Navickas in her studies on northern English Luddism, is welcome in the context of Scottish Highland protest research, and presents the Highland landscape as something other than a passive backdrop to protest.

In stressing that the ‘microhistorical approach is one that offers much to the historian’, Robertson develops some of his key ideas through three case studies, shifting the focus very much from the regional to the local (161–93). The three Hebridean localities under investigation are Cheesebay (North Uist); Park (Lewis); and Raasay, and these studies allow a narrative that incorporates the story of the event with the ‘popular memory’ of the event. As a result, Robertson asserts (192) that ‘collective memory can constitute a powerful resource for the political culture of subordinate groups’. Despite the author's justifiable complaint (227) that ‘history has given less weight to the later Land Wars than it has to those of the 1880s’, an ironic by-product of this highly competent interdisciplinary study is that it is likely to force a methodological reassessment of various aspects of the ‘earlier’ Highland Land Wars from around 1874 to 1914.