This book examines the economic development of the southernmost quarter of the parish of Kilfinan - Kerry of Kilfinan - in the Cowal peninsula of Argyll, Scotland, during the period 1790-1870, which has become known in the United Kingdom as the Industrial Revolution. The examination begins by looking at the significant changes in agriculture and land use as subsistence farming was pushed out by sheep, with residents turning to herring fishing to compensate for their loss. The opening of a gunpowder factory in the parish stemmed the tide of departures by providing paid work for the existing population and attracting the inward migration of skilled workers from elsewhere. It also led to investment in infrastructure, with the construction of new roads and piers. The book also looks at the development of tourism to the parish with its proximity to the Central Belt and the advent of cheap and plentiful steamers bringing members of the urban middle class, where many eventually decided to build the Victorian villas that exist along the shore, creating new opportunities for the people of Kerry of Kilfinan.

A reissue of Norman MacLeod's nineteenth-century bestseller - but with a difference. The names and places which the author attemptedto conceal, because of the political correctness of the time, are reconstructed

Storm clouds always gather over the story of the Highland Clearances. The eviction of the Highlanders from the glens and straths of the Highlands and Islands of the north of Scotland still causes great historical dispute more than a century after the events. The Highland Clearances also generated a great deal of contemporary controversy and documentation. The record comes in diverse forms and with radically different provenances, offering excellent material for exercises in historical analysis and selection. Debating the Highland Clearances introduces the Highland Clearances as a classic historical problem. Eric Richards reviews the historical debate and examines the methods and sources employed by the combatants past and present. The debates among historians, novelists, politicians and economists are no less passionate today and raise major questions about interpretation and the appropriate frame of reference for the noisy and continuing public debate about the Highland Clearances. This book prese