Land, Faith and the Crofting Community: Christianity and Social Criticism in the Highlands of Scotland 1843-1893 (Scottish Historical Review Monographs)

This book probes the deep-rooted links between the land, the people and the religious culture of the Scottish Highlands and Islands in the nineteenth century.The responses of the clergy to the social crisis which enveloped the region have often been characterised as a mixture of callous indifference, cowering deference or fatalistic passivity.Allan MacColl’s pioneering research challenges such stereotypical representations of Highland ministers head-on.Land, Faith and the Crofting Community is the first full-scale examination of Christian social teaching in the nineteenth-century Gaidhealtachd and addresses a major gap in the historical understanding of Gaelic society.Seeking to lay bare the existing myths by a wide-ranging analysis of all the denominational, theological and social factors at play, this study boldly overturns the received scholarly and popular interpretations.A ground-breaking work, it explores a substantial but under-utilised field of evidence and questions whether or