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Planting Thistles
Scottish Islander Colonization in Late Victorian Canada
Timothy S. Forest (Author)
9780774870979
Hardback, published 2 March 2026
456 pages, 17 b&w photos, 9 maps, 8 illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.666 kg
At the height of the Victorian age, governments on both sides of the Atlantic targeted Scottish crofters from the Outer Hebrides as ideal colonists, proposing settlement schemes in British Columbia and on the Prairies that were to bring benefits to the region and the settlers themselves. Within six years, these plans were considered tragic failures. Planting Thistles explores the motivations, misfires, and consequences of this state-sponsored colonization. Timothy S. Forest links the programs to shifting and interconnected factors: economic concerns, uprisings in the Hebrides and in Canada, political prerogatives, imperial defensive priorities, demographics, clashes between Enlightenment and Social Darwinist values, and disagreements over imperial decline and state interventionism. The apparent failure of transplanted Scots to meet expectations – that they would save the region from foreign and Indigenous threats – prompted late Victorians to re-examine issues of religion, race, class, gender, Britishness, and modernity itself. Timothy S. Forest's deft analysis expands our understanding of imperialist assumptions and settler colonialism.
Introduction: Promises Made, Promises Broken 1 The Crofters: Their History to the 1880s 2 The Last, Best West: The Rise of Crofter Colonization in the Prairies 3 Illusions Shattered: The Implosion of Crofter Colonization 4 White Fishermen, Red Menace, Yellow Peril: Crofter Colonization in British Columbia 5 The Gates Come Crashing Down: The Collapse of British Columbia's "Gigantic Scheme" 6 Colonization's Last Gasps: The Crofters and Western Canada Afterword: The Legacy of Crofter Colonization Notes; Selected Bibliography; Index