Books: Argyll, 1730

In this thoroughly researched, comprehensive and instantly accessible book, Robert McGeachy tells the story of a revolution – one that would extend to the rest of the Highlands and Islands – set in train when Argyll’s leading families, Campbells always prominent among them, turned their backs on clanship and embraced an explicitly capitalist approach to the management of their estates.

Robert McGeachy’s sympathies lie with the victims of this revolution – men and women whose communities fell apart as the pace of landlord-induced change accelerated. But for all that those people suffered because of what was done to them, they did not suffer passively. If Argyll’s lairds were at the forefront of modernising – as they saw it – Highlands and Islands society, the generality of Argyll’s population were in the vanguard of organising resistance to the new order. Their fightback, as Robert McGeachy shows conclusively, was both more widespread and more effective than generally tends to be thought.

Argyll 1730–1850 also examines what is to be learned of social upheaval from folk belief; quarrying, mining and the beginnings of industrialisation; Argyll men’s increasing participation in the British military; official hostility to Gaelic; and just about everything, in fact, that helped to make Argyll, by the mid-nineteenth century, so radically different from the Argyll of a hundred years before.

Robert McGeachy grew up in Argyll. He read history at Stirling University and then went on to the University of Glasgow where he was awarded an M.Litt.

Argyll, 1730 - 1850