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Article: Nineteenth-Century Cape Breton: A Historical Geography.
- Article from:
- The Geographical Review
- Article date:
- July 1, 1993
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1993 American Geographical Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Using Cape Breton Island, an island of marginal significance in the North Atlantic world, as an instructive case study of human migration and resource exploitation, Stephen J. Hornsby has written an elegant little book. For administrators of the British empire posting to Cape Breton Island during the nineteenth century was banishment. There fishing, desultory coal mining, and hardscrabble farming were conducted by people who, for the most part, had been rejected elsewhere. The post-Jacobite clearances of highland Scots, the rise and fall of the Scottish kelp trade, and an unheralded potato blight on the island figured into a rapid cycle of immigration, subsistence-level ...