Scottish Exodus

This groundbreaking account of Scotland’s diaspora is a fascinating study in character and identity.

Over the years, millions of native Scots have left their home country, yet they have been written about only in general terms. Scottish Exodus breaks new ground by taking a set of emigrants by the name of MacLeod and, with the help of their descendants, investigates exactly what happened to them.

These MacLeods began as Scots, but became French aristocrats, Polish resistance fighters, Irish priests, Texan ranchers, New Zealand shepherds, Australian gold miners, Aboriginal activists and Nova Scotian farmers. One nineteenth-century MacLeod even swapped his Gaelic for Arabic, and his Christianity for Islam before settling down comfortably in Cairo.

Based on unpublished documents, letters and family histories, and on the author’s travels in the company of today’s MacLeods — some of them still in Scotland, others in the United States, Australia, Canada, England, Poland, France, New Zealand and South Africa — Scottish Exodus is a tale of horror and hardship, disastrous voyages and the hazards of pioneering on faraway frontiers. But it is also the moving story of how people separated from Scotland by hundreds of years and thousands of miles continue to identify with the small country where their global journeys began.- From the Hardcover edition.