Between 1735 and 1748 hundreds of young men and their families emigrated from the Scottish Highlands to the Georgia coast to settle and protect the new British colony. These men were recruited by the trustees of the colony and military governor James Oglethorpe, who wanted settlers who were accustomed to hardship, militant in nature, and willing to become frontier farmer-soldiers. In this respect, the Highlanders fit the bill perfectly through training and tradition. Recruiting and settling the Scottish Highlanders as the first line of defense on the southern frontier in Georgia was an important decision on the part of the trustees and crucial for the survival of the colony, but this portion of Georgia's history has been sadly neglected until now. By focusing on the Scots themselves, Anthony W. Parker explains what factors motivated the Highlanders to leave their native glens of Scotland for the pine barrens of Georgia and attempts to account for the reasons their cultural distinctiveness and "old world" experience aptly prepared them to play a vital role in the survival of Georgia in this early and precarious moment in its history.

This impressive collection of essays is based on a two-year seminar series of the Research centre in Scottish History at the University of Strathclyde. New and original research, as well as historiographical overviews and commentaries, illuminate the study of this formative century in the creation of modern Scotland. Contributors are leading figures in their fields, and the Scottish experience is examined within an international dimension. Topics include Scottish modernisation before the Industrial Revolution, the Union of 1707, Scotland and British expansion, Scottish Jacobitism, the Catholic underground, Scottish national identity, the Scottish Enlightenment, urbanisation, demographic change, Scottish Gaeldom, Highland estate management and tenant emigration, and Scottish radicalism. Contributors: Thomas M. Devine, John R. Young, Michael Fry, Allan I. Macinnes, James F. McMillan, Alexander Murdoch, Richard J. Finlay, Jane Rendall, Bernard Aspinwall, Ian D. Whyte, Robert E. Tyson, T. C. Smout, Andrew Mackillop, Christopher A. Whatley, Elaine W. McFarland.

This is an appraisal of clanship both with respect to its vitality and its eventual demise, in which the author views clanship as a socio-economic, as well as a political agency, deriving its strength from personal obligations and mutual service between chiefs and gentry and their clansmen. Its demise is attributed to the throwing over of these personal obligations by the clan elite, not to legislation or central government repression. The book discusses the impact on the clans of the inevitable shift, with the passage of time, from feudalism to capitalism, regardless of the "Forty Five". It draws upon estate papers, family correspondence, financial compacts, social bonds and recorded oral tradition rather than the biased records of central government.

This distinguished monograph is a treatise on the causes and character of Scottish emigration to North America prior to the American Revolution. Entire chapters are then devoted to Lowland and Highland emigration, forced transportation of felons and the drafting of Scottish troops to the colonies, rising rents and other factors in the Scottish social structure, and the British government's role in colonization. Three concluding chapters cover the geographical centers of Scottish settlement--especially the Carolinas.