Scottish Exodus: Travels Among a Worldwide Clan By: Jim Hunter

About the Author

The book is written by historian Dr Jim Hunter, the former chairman of Highlands and Islands Enterprise, who is now working for North Highland College and for the prospective University of the Highlands and Islands as director of its centre for history

Book Synopsis

Over the years, millions of native Scots have left their home country but, until now, they have been written about only in general terms. Scottish Exodus breaks new ground by taking a set of emigrants, by the name of MacLeod and, with the help of their descendants, investigating exactly what happened to them. These people began as Scots but became, among other things, French aristocrats, Polish resistance fighters and revolutionaries, Irish priests, Texan ranchers, New Zealand shepherds, Australian goldminers, prairie homesteaders, Aboriginal and African-American activists, Canadian mounted policemen, Confederate rebels and Nova Scotian farmers. One nineteenth-century MacLeod even went so far as to swap his Gaelic for Arabic and his Christianity for Islam before settling down comfortably in Cairo. This groundbreaking account of Scotland's worldwide diaspora is based on unpublished documents, letters and family histories. It is also based on the author's international travels in the company of today's MacLeods - some of them still in Scotland, others in countries such as the United States, Australia, Canada, England, Poland, France, New Zealand and South Africa. Scottish Exodus is a tale of horror and hardship, disastrous voyages, famine and dispossession: the hazards of pioneering on faraway frontiers. But it is also the moving story of how people separated from Scotland by hundreds of years and thousands of miles continue to identify with the small country where their global journeys began

Special signed/numbered copies with the ACMS Special Edition dust-jacket are available from ACMS online sales at £14.99 plus postage and packing from the UK.