Much the most striking feature of this collection, to someone of my vintage, is its scope and diversity. When, in 1971, I began researching the doctoral thesis published, five years later, as The Making of the Crofting Community, academic enquiry into the post-Culloden Highlands and Islands was notable mainly by its absence. There was little on the clearances, next to nothing on the famine era, a couple of sketchy articles on the Land League period and still less on early twentieth-century land settlement – despite such settlement then being within living memory. Nor was migration from the region, whether to the rest of the UK or to overseas destinations, much better served. In 1971, it followed available academic analysis of the topics I was looking to explore could be got through in days. This, from my perspective, was a good thing. It meant that I was able, with the brash confidence of youth, to set about constructing, more or less from scratch, my own crofter-centred take on the history of the West Highlands and Islands in the period between the 1790s and the 1920s. Today that would be difficult. As can be seen from this book's contents, academic explorations of Highlands and Islands history – a history seen increasingly to have been influenced by Highlands and Islands involvements with the wider world – has uncovered nuance and complexity of a kind that, half a century ago, was utterly unknown to me.

In 1974, my thesis completed, I quit the world of academic history and wouldn't re-enter it until, from 2005, I spent five years helping to provide the University of the Highlands and Islands with its Dornoch-based Centre for History. But during the later 1970s and throughout the 1980s, when working as a journalist and when employed for a period by the Scottish Crofters Union, I continued to be intrigued by the north of Scotland's past and by the way an understanding of this past, or so I’ve long thought, can aid efforts to provide the region and its population with a worthwhile future. And so, on a freelance basis now, I began again, in the 1990s and subsequently, to write history – with a view, in part, to looking into the experiences of the many people who left the Highlands and Islands to make new lives for themselves in North America.