Description:
This book traces the development, and subsequent implementation, of the policy of plantation from the mid-sixteenth through to the early seventeenth century focusing specifically on the North Channel context.
Review Quotes:
This is an important and original regional study of the interconnected communities in Scotland and Ireland that spanned North Channel from the late middle ages into the early seventeenth century. In a meticulously researched and engagingly written book, Alison Cathcart brings fresh perspectives to the comings and goings of mercenaries, merchants, mariners, and migrants. In an era when the sea united the communities in the archipelago of islands that comprised the North Channel world, she places welcome emphasis on climate, cultivation, and commerce as she untangles the civilising schemes of Elizabeth I and James VI and I. This is a must read for anyone wanting to understand plantations and colonisation in both Ireland and Scotland. (Professor Jane Ohlmeyer, Chair, Irish Research Council, and Erasmus Smith's Professor of Modern History (1762) Trinity College Dublin)
The North Channel linking Ireland and Scotland was one of the key waterways of Western Europe in early modern times. For numerous Highland Gaels, Irish, English, and Lowland Scots it was a route to rapacious profit, exile, death, and much else. Alison Cathcart's luminous study casts new light on those historic connections and firmly establishes herself in the front rank of Scottish and Irish historians of that period. (Professor Emeritus Sir Tom Devine Kt OBE HonMRIA FRSE FBA)