Written by a man who is both an award-winning historian of the Highlands and Islands and a key figure in shaping the region's future development, Last of the Free is a ground-breaking and definitive account of how the Highlands and Islands of Scotland evolved into the way they are today. Never before has the history of the Highlands and Islands been recounted so comprehensively and in so much fascinating, often moving detail. But this book is not simply the story of humanity's millenium-long involvement with one of the world's most spectacular localities. It is also a major contribution to present-day debate about how Scotland-and Britain should be organised. James Hunter's central contention is that the Highlands and Islands were most successful when the region possessed a large measure of autonomy, which turned places like Iona and Kirkwall into centres of European significance. That autonomy was destroyed, this book maintains, by medieval Scotland's monarchy, by seventeenth-century Scotland's Parliament and by the British politicians who inherited the Scottish state's unrelenting determination to ensure that inhabitants of the Highlands and Islands had no worthwhile control ove