Testimonies of Transition

About the Book: 

Marjory Harper explores the motives and experiences of migrants, settlers and returners by focusing on the personal testimonies of the two million men, women and children who left Scotland in the 20th century.

Reviews: 

Why have so many folk felt a need to quit Scotland and what happened to them after they left? To get answers to these questions, Marjory Harper did something that’s never before been done on so ambitious a scale. She travelled the world to meet, speak with and record the folk whose voices are central to this ceaselessly intriguing book. But Harper does much more than set down what she’s been told by her emigrant interviewees. A superb and highly readable historian, Harper ranges across the centuries to give additional context and meaning to the stories, thoughts and emotions she’s so memorably captured. JAMES HUNTER, Emeritus Professor of History, University of the Highlands and Islands

About the Author:

MARJORY HARPER is a Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen and an Associate Professor at the University of the Highlands and Islands’ Centre for History. Her study of Scottish emigration in the nineteenth century, Adventurers and Exiles, won the Saltire Society Scottish History Book of the Year Prize in 2004. With Professor Stephen Constantine, she co-authored Migration and Empire (2010), a Companion volume in the Oxford History of the British Empire. She and her husband live in rural Aberdeenshire.