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1689 map of Scotland. The Seven Ill Years, also known as the Seven Lean Years (Scottish Gaelic: seachd bliadhna gorta), is the term used for a period of widespread and prolonged famine in Scotland during the 1690s, named after the biblical famine in Egypt predicted by Joseph in the Book of Genesis. [1]
The Highland Potato Famine (Scottish Gaelic: Gaiseadh a' bhuntàta) was a period of 19th-century Highland and Scottish history (1846 to roughly 1856) over which the agricultural communities of the Hebrides and the western Scottish Highlands (Gàidhealtachd) saw their potato crop (upon which they had become over-reliant) repeatedly devastated by potato blight.
The potato famine followed shortly after the collapse of the kelp industry. Faced with a severe famine, the government made clear to any reluctant landlords that they had the primary responsibility of feeding their destitute tenants, whether through employment in public works or estate improvement, or simply by the provision of famine relief.
Emigration to escape the famine centred mainly on Ireland and the Scottish Highlands. Elsewhere in the United Kingdom and on the continent , conditions were not so harsh as to completely eradicate the basics of survival so as to require mass migration of the sort experienced in Ireland and Scotland.
A Scottish Lowland farm from John Slezer's Prospect of Dunfermline, published in the Theatrum Scotiae, 1693. Agriculture in Scotland in the early modern era includes all forms of farm production in the modern boundaries of Scotland, between the establishment of the Renaissance in the early sixteenth century and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century.
In 1846, the Highland Potato Famine caused a crisis in the Highlands and the islands of Western Scotland, an area already struggling with overpopulation [2] [3] [4] and the upheavals of the Highland Clearances. The deaths from starvation were so high that, in 1848–1849, the government delivered shipments of oatmeal to locations along the ...
In the early seventeenth century famine was relatively common, with four periods of famine prices between 1620 and 1625. The English invasions of the 1640s had a profound impact on the Scottish economy, with the destruction of crops and the disruption of markets resulting in some of the most rapid price rises of the century. [ 47 ]
Jenny Wormald has commented that, "to talk of Scotland as a poor country is a truism". [1] At the beginning of the era, with difficult terrain, poor roads and limited methods of transport, there was little trade between different areas of the country and most settlements depended on what was produced locally, often with very little in reserve in bad years.