Planting Thistles

At the height of the Victorian age, governments on both sides of the Atlantic targeted Scottish crofters from the Outer Hebrides for resettlement in Western Canada. Officials singled out Hebrideans as ideal colonists, proposing schemes in British Columbia and on the Prairies that engendered high hopes of benefits for 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 births and deaths of the settlement 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, disagreements over imperial decline, and competing attitudes toward state interventionism and the worthiness of its recipients.

As the schemes progressed, the apparent failure of transplanted Scots to meet expectations – that they would save the region from foreign and Indigenous threats – raised questions about who and what made a Briton. Far from exemplifying Britishness, the Hebrideans themselves came to be seen as “other,” and late Victorians were prompted to re-examine issues of religion, race, class, gender, and modernity itself. Timothy S. Forest’s deft analysis expands our understanding of imperialist assumptions and settler colonialism.