Insurrection: Scotland’s Famine Winter James Hunter. Birlinn, 2019 304 pages Hardcover, £20.00 ISBN: 9781780276229
With the 1976 publication of his groundbreaking book The Making of the Crofting Community, James Hunter established his place as our foremost historian of the Scottish highlands. That reputation has been cemented over the years by books including Set Adrift on the World (2015), which chronicled the Sutherland clearances, and A Dance Called America (1994), which traced the lives of the cleared highlanders in their new homes across the Atlantic.
In Insurrection, Hunter, now emeritus professor of History at the University of the Highlands and Islands, shines a light on a series of dramatic and little known episodes from the winter of 1846- 47. These were the ‘disturbances’ that took place in towns and villages from Fort William in the west to Aberdeen in the east, as communities faced the consequences of the failure of the potato crop. With the exception of the late Eric Richards’ 1982 article ‘The Last Scottish Food Riots’ in the academic journal Past and Present, this is a topic that has escaped serious scholarly attention.