Over a quarter of a century ago, Roy Campbell issued a plea that historians of Scotland should pay less attention to the Highlands. He said that a certain ‘crucial matter’ – ‘the relations of landowner and tenant in the Lowlands in the [nineteenth] century’ – should instead take centre stage.

Here I utter a parallel request: that Scottish historians should pay more attention to the Northern Isles of Scotland than they have been in the habit of doing. There is, for instance, not a single reference to Shetland or Orkney in Tom Devine's The Scottish Nation 1700–2000 (2000). The reason for this neglect must be a view by historians, but not archaeologists or sociologists, that the affairs of the small-scale northern societies are insignificant. It would be a difficult argument to sustain.

Sometimes the historians blunder about in the history of the north. The late Rosalind Mitchison, writing in 1983, summarised what she thought happened in Orkney and Shetland in the first half of the seventeenth century. Bishop James Law, she said,

It's a dramatic account. I hope to show, by looking closely at an episode around 1640, that it is over-simple and wrong.

* * *

Bishop Law moved from Orkney to Glasgow in 1615. He was succeeded in the north by George Graham, who had been bishop of Dunblane since 1603. Graham had become foster-parent to two lads from Scone, Patrik Smyth and Andro Smyth, sons of a Perthshire laird, and he took them to Orkney. Patrik married the bishop's daughter and became a prominent Orkney laird; Andro, my key figure, made a career with his neat, fluent handwriting, and married a daughter of Harie Aitken, the commissary, another key figure in the new establishment in the islands.

Despite the emergence of new economic sectors, or the marked modernisation of others throughout the eighteenth century, Scotland's economy remained overwhelmingly based upon what land and livestock could provide. The Scottish agricultural sector was fundamentally changed during this period, with a whole raft of ‘improvements’ taking place. These boosted the productivity and profitability of the country's soil, but could also cause severe social dislocation within rural communities. Many of these alterations would not have taken place without the establishment of a formal banking system. The chartered banks provided vital capital for landowners operating in an area of the economy, and a country, which at this time suffered from a lack of liquidity.

This chapter considers the intrinsic link between the development of Scottish banking and agricultural reform. It does so by examining some of the records of the Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland during the first half of the eighteenth century, particularly the court minutes for both banking houses. An analysis of these sources sheds some light on the nature of agricultural improvement during a period which has been somewhat under-examined by historians, when compared with the period after 1760 when the speed of improvement increased.

The specific questions considered include the following: What proportion of bank loans went to landowners? Were landowners based in particular regions more likely to receive credit than those from other parts of the country? To what extent was money loaned to landowners used to improve their estates? These considerations are also placed within the context of Scottish economic thought, which often prioritised the modernisation of the rural economy and felt that the emerging banking sector should be geared to serve its development.

* * *

Throughout most of the eighteenth century, Scotland's economy remained overwhelmingly based upon what land and livestock could provide in spite of the emergence of new and profitable sectors, such as the tobacco and sugar trades, as well as the modernisation of linen production and other fledgling industries. One of the most comprehensive studies of the Scottish tobacco trade has asserted that, in spite of its growth, by as late as 1760 at least 80 per cent of the country's output was still generated by agriculture. In this century, Scottish farming certainly did not stand still.

STUDY OF HISTORY

There are as many ways of studying history as there are traces left to interpret. Even applying the hypothetico-deductive approach to it, there is still only so much that can be deduced directly from an object before context needs to be evaluated for additional information. For textile fragments especially, the context of the find site, whether it is a burial, or a settlement, is particularly important for the identification and interpretation. Within archaeological contexts with no organic remains, traces left from pro cessing raw materials into textiles can suggest that textile production took place at a particular location.

Often the best way to test a textile artefact to understand its use and importance in daily life is to use it. Since original artefacts are usually too fragile or fragmentary for people to handle, reconstructions are made and tested. Textiles are a good example of where hard-to-describe qualities such as drape, softness, lustre, stretch, toughness and warmth can form a large part of the interpreted function and status of an object, especially for a costume.

These are all qualities that are subjective to the wearer and their society. Personal preferences and experiences of both the maker and the wearer can have a large impact on the finished object and therefore our interpretation of it. Being able to re-create a textile means that technical properties such as thread count and size, and fibre thickness, suddenly translate into an object that can be evaluated according to its more intangible qualities.

RECONSTRUCTING AND RE-ENACTING HISTORY

There are several different types of textile reconstruction, which are used for different purposes. Experimental archaeologists, textile historians and anthropologists try to collect new information and answer questions, such as what an object is, how it was made, how much time and resources were used in making it, its purpose and what kind of traces are left by production and/or use.

Museums, especially open-air venues such as the Foteviken Viking Museum at Hollviken, Skane, Sweden, the Plimoth Plantation, Massachusetts, USA and the Weald and Downland Living Museum near Chichester, UK, often employ historical re-enactment and reproductions to bring history to life.

Cognitive and systematic examination, analysis, and documentation of textile artefacts as part of the post-excavation investigative conservation process provide valuable insights into artefact technology, material culture, and human and material adaptation. In addition to the study of the material state and features, the conservator1 assesses the nature and state of preservation. Through this, one gains insight into what changes have taken place to the textile, and when during the active and post-deposition lifetime of the object. There are multiple layers of evidence available, starting with diagnostic changes to the outer surfaces (e.g. loss of surface fibres), internal microstructural changes (e.g. fibre bioerosion), and chemical alterations (e.g. mineral perfusion of fibres). The state and nature of preservation of archaeological textiles testify not only to use during their active lifetime, such as wear, damage, and loss, but also to the nature of, and dynamic interaction with, their post-depositional burial environment. The conser vator's expert knowledge of this complexity and interactivity of textile materials with their environment enables them to help make sense of archaeological textiles. In this respect, conservation can contribute in a substantive way to a wider cultural, archaeological, and environmental interpretation of this material.

This chapter explores the contributions that the archaeological conservator's expert knowledge and specialist conservation skills can make to the study of textile artefacts. Its scope is not restricted by time period, cultural context, burial environment, or geographical region, although many examples are drawn from the north-eastern Atlantic region. The corpus of archaeological textiles and methodological approaches for their analysis and study are briefly described. It is the conservator's naked eye and observation using equipment readily available in most archaeological conservation laboratories (e.g. microscopy, X-radiography, etc.) that is fundamental for their investigation of textile artefacts. The range of analytical equipment that augments visual observation available in today's conservation laboratory varies widely from large national museums to local and regional museums. More specialised and expensive analytical instruments to which conservation professionals in smaller institutions cannot easily obtain access are not discussed here.

Most of what we know about agriculture in early modern Scotland comes from written sources concerned directly to record its business aspects. Estate papers record landlords’ dealings with their tenants. Testaments record farmers’ possessions. Baron court minutes record the adjudication of disputes and the making of agricultural rules. All these records had to be written in order to keep track of people's property and to enforce property rights. Although they were written for the benefit of those with substantial landed property, they also give us glimpses of the farm work of the propertyless. Such sources have enabled historians – including those contributing to this book – to answer many questions about early modern agriculture.

But are there other questions that we can ask – questions that these businesslike records cannot answer? Here I have in mind questions about the cultural meanings of agriculture for educated and literate Scots. What did agriculture mean to these people, who were almost never farmers themselves? Even the literate elite lived in daily proximity to tilled fields in which they saw crops growing, pastures in which they saw cattle and sheep grazing, and farming settlements in which they saw poultry scratching. The peasants who worked those fields, herded those animals and inhabited those settlements were often their own tenants, some of whom they may have known personally. Everyday diets, even of members of the elite, contained many meat, dairy and grain products derived from those same fields, processed locally in recognisable ways by those same peasants. The elite also craved exotic luxuries, but these were paid for, as they well knew, by their tenants’ rents. The seasonal round, even for the elite, was tangibly shaped by agriculture, with spring ploughing and autumn harvesting as intense periods in which landlords’ attention would be drawn to their estates. Culturally speaking, how did members of the elite experience all this? What did agriculture mean to them?

This chapter will range beyond the familiar sources for agricultural history. It will examine, not what people had to write about agriculture, but what they chose to write about it when they didn't have to. One point should be stressed at the outset: the harvest of such voluntary writing is far from bountiful. The sources discussed in this chapter are all informative in some way, but also informative is the enormous silence maintained about agriculture by most literate Scots in this period.

Ishmael Beah's Radiance of Tomorrow and In Koli Jean Bofane's Congo INC.

The politics of migration are radically tethered to the politics of the environment and the multinational corporations that instrumentalize and commodify people, the environment, and the land's resources. In our contemporary neoliberal mode of governance, the health of people and the planet is rendered secondary to the concerns of quenching the seemingly insatiable greed of multinational corporations. While the planet and its resources have been instrumentalized, people are viewed as impediments to neoliberal “progress” and neocolonial “development.” The instrumentalization of nature is nothing short of the commodification of nature with the goal of maximizing profit that attends the process of accumulation by dispossession as articulated by David Harvey. Environmental devastation and accumulation by dispossession create an understudied phenomenon that African literature attends to: migration, forced or otherwise, due to environmental devastation. Migrating as a result of environmental devastation often results in regional forms of migration that both novels represent and that extends our investigation of the myriad of forms of migration tracked throughout the course of this book. Although First World Western countries are primarily responsible for the global environmental crisis, it is the poor in the putative Third World and future generations who will largely bear the burden of the West's unsustainable living practices and the corporate and capitalist consumer ideologies sustaining them. Environmental devastation forces those in targeted resource areas to migrate due to the pollution of water and destruction of lands and resources that decreases the livelihood of those affected by environmental devastation.

Recent environmental studies discourse is awash with a host of neologisms attempting to grasp the environmental crisis. The concepts range from the Anthropocene to the Capitalocene and the Eurocene. The aforesaid labels purport to mark epochs to locate a timeframe, or better an origin story, for the emergence of our environmental crisis. In the Eurocene, it is the emergence and planetary spread of European practices of colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and the ascension and acceleration of consumer capitalism. In the Anthropocene, it is the emergence of man and carbon to create the Thermocene.

A seventeenth-century proverb, pointing out the Devil's busy activity every day in Scotland, also reminds us that Scottish folk encountered dykes every day in the course of their busy activity in farming. Dykes were everyday aspects of the infrastructure of farming, vital but often overlooked. This chapter aims to bring these dykes to life.

* * *

The ability to separate areas of land was crucial to prevent livestock damaging crops; this role was often fulfilled by dykes within the fermtoun communities. These fermtouns were collections of families who lived close together and farmed partly together, partly as individuals. Their dykes were upright freestanding structures used to separate families’ crop areas from communal land, animals from oats, or a lord's private property from the fermtoun's domain. Other means of dividing land included ditches, and indeed during the enclosing movement both ditches and dykes were often used in combination.

Whilst the study of farming in early modern Scotland has covered a wide range of topics, little research has been done into how farming people used the dykes and what these dykes were like. Fenton and Leitch have offered a broad overview, covering mainly the period since agricultural ‘Improvement’ but with some attention to the earlier period. Dodgshon has investigated the division of land among tenants in addition to field systems and other agricultural matters, but he has not considered the variation in dykes or the people involved with the life of a dyke. Fenton's studies of Scottish farming in this period also touch on dykes; however, he does not explore this topic in depth for mainland Scotland, limiting his main investigation to Orkney and Shetland. Robertson has researched head dykes and their placement in the landscape. Shepherd has mentioned briefly that there was ‘an extensive array of pre-“Improvement” boundaries’ in north-eastern Scotland. This chapter sets out to analyse dykes both in their physical nature and in people's relationships with them.

Some of the sources are from the first half of the eighteenth century and thus from the end of early modern farming, although it must be remembered that it was only after about 1750 that agrarian change spread quickly.

I was born somewhere in northern Ethiopia towards the end of 1985 and adopted via private adoption to Canada in 1987. I do not have any reliable information about my background as there is no paper trail. The lack of information and my inability to get answers started to torment me in my adult years. Reflecting on the injustices in adoption through reading critical perspectives such as Trenka, Oparah, and Shin's 2006 books Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption catapulted me into the world of adoptee advocacy. I was eager to connect with adoptees sharing critical perspectives on adoption by weaving the personal with the political and I felt a deep sense of liberation and belonging which I had never experienced before.

As I became active in adoptee circles, I noticed the lack of Ethiopian adoptees there. After a series of adoptee suicides, including of Fisseha Sol Samuel, fellow adoptee advocate Aselefech Evans and I created a closed Facebook group for Ethiopian adoptees. We wanted to understand the low level of visibility of Ethiopian adoptees and felt it was imperative to break the isolation experienced by many adoptees by creating a safe space where they could connect with other adoptees and feel a sense of community.

Admittedly, I had unrealistic expectations about the group; I imagined compelling discussions and a slew of exciting project ideas, however, there was not much engagement at first. Nonetheless, adoptees messaged us privately telling us how happy they were to have a space for Ethiopian adoptees.

I continued my quest for more Ethiopian adoptee engagement and discovered public French Ethiopian adoptee groups where many discussions were happening about returning to Ethiopia for travel and to find family. I quickly started chatting with dozens of adoptees for months, sometimes lasting into the early hours of the morning. I was ecstatic about their openness to discuss their experiences and to know more about adoption from France and French perceptions of adoption.

This essay draws on a combination of discussions with adoptees (particularly Ethiopian French adoptees), personal experiences, and academic research. Research on international adoption tends to focus on adoptees’ ability to adapt to their adoptive families and their new environment. This research is usually conducted by non-adoptee academics who tend to be adoptive parents or former adoption professionals.