Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 245

This book is an ethnological study of belonging or identity between 1750 and 1950, in Perthshire, a county that has received little research by rural and agricultural researchers. The study stems from the author’s own interest in his family roots, especially on his father’s side of the family, ‘most of whom continued to live and work on farms in and around Perthshire until recent retiral’ (p.1). The author brings together a wide range of evidence including oral testimony from his own semi-structured interviews of his relatives, archival recordings, documentary evidence and estate records, to examine the themes of the agricultural transformation of Perthshire (improvement and post-improvement); family labour (especially women and children) and its importance to the post-improvement agricultural communities and the experience of farming life; and the ‘temporary family’ of the farm bothy (examined through the development of that system of housing and an account of bothy life). This is followed by a detailed analysis of communal labour and neighbour-based reciprocity and charity (exchange labour and charity labour) in the second half of the book.

For each theme, the author provides closely argued and reflective theoretical, historical and cultural frameworks, bringing together and considering the wider debate of a number of scholars. That analysis provides a helpful framework for his work on Perthshire. The author adopts and uses a number of well established methodological approaches to examine a range of themes: for example, he uses those developed by Åke Campbell and Bjarne Stoklund (1976) to provide a cultural ecology model of Perthshire (pp.76–81), and Ian Levitt and T.C.Smout’s (1979) methodological approach to the examination of the Poor Law Enquiry of 1843 to assess the employment of children in agriculture (p.87). He also develops further some of the existing methodological approaches. In particular, his development of a working model of communal labour systems is particularly useful.

The strongest, and also the most interesting, part of the book examines communal labour systems; the author has already separately published this work in a number of articles. This is an aspect of rural life that has received very little attention in Scotland but has received some interest in other countries, such as Ireland. Indeed, he acknowledges Anne O’Dowd’s Meitheal: A study of co-operative labour in rural Ireland (1981), as an important stimulus for his work and draws extensively on her theoretical framework. The author explains that these systems were a ‘phenomenon [that] has been widespread throughout Perthshire during the past two centuries, and its various manifestations have contributed to local society at a number of levels’ (p.284). It was also a feature that ‘was by no means unique’ to this county. (p.284). This is an area of study that deserves further attention.

As a county study, the absence of a map which details the various localities and districts mentioned is frustrating. This is particularly so for understanding the distribution of evidence on child employment (pp.87–8), the geographical location of the agricultural improvement case studies (pp.42–56, 67–61, 61–74), as well as the distribution of the bothy system in 1867 (p.133), and the preference for married or unmarried servants (pp.138–40).

The research is clearly a personal journey for the author to ‘document and understand the way of life of those people from whom I have come …’ (p.2). On the last page, he indicates that this had a profound impact on him: ‘only now do I feel I have the personal and ethnological grounding from which to move on’ (p.288). However, while he accomplished a personal journey in undertaking his research and writing up his findings (the manuscript formed his doctoral thesis, completed in 2000), he ran out of energy before he published his manuscript. The theoretical and cultural frameworks which he used as a context for his work are mostly from studies published between the mid- 1980s and the mid-1990s – they took me back to the books I was reading as an undergraduate nearly 20 years ago – and take no account of developments thereafter. Indeed, beyond 1995 there are few references: there are six between 1995 and 2000 and seven from 2000 onwards, of which four relate to the author’s own work. Some of the debates are out of date and have not been revised to take into account new developments since he started his research around 1990. For example, his account of the nature of the agricultural revolution hinges on the work of C.Beveridge and R.Turnbull, published in 1989, and others who also undertook research at an earlier date. Since that time, the debate has moved significantly forward by studies such as T.M.Devine’s The transformation of the Scottish countryside (1994). Although Devine’s study does not discuss Perthshire, it provides much invaluable evidence that would have informed West’s analysis of the improvements at Delvine. West’s recordings of his family members were made in 1995–6, and neither the text nor the bibliography reveal whether he undertook further interviews as his research developed. In a number of instances he refers to ‘recent research’ and ‘in recent years’, which he specifically denotes as being in the 1980s and 1990s (pp.9, 10, 14, 31, 40, 84, 143, 173–178, 215, 279) – it should be remembered that his book was published in 2007. As it stands, the book is an out-dated study that regrettably would have had more force if it had been published a decade ago.