A number of scholars argue that Protestant Scots
migrations to Ireland in the seventeenth century
were precipitated by overpopulation and economic
hardships, especially those that struck South-
western Scotland. Cultural geographer Barry Aron
Vann challenges that assessment. He unravels the
complex assemblage of push and pull factors that
played roles in seventeenth-century Scottish
migrations. Space of Time or Distance of Place is an apt title
for his book. Those words were part of a letter
written by the Scottish born and educated Rev Robert
Blair (1593-1666) to his Glasgow University mentor.
Blair, as a key religious leader of a Scottish
community living in seventeenth-century Ireland,
demonstrated that he remained a member of an
imagined community that Vann calls the Melvillian
Scottish ecclesiastical intelligentsia. Vann
uniquely demonstrates how religious thought worlds
tied to space and nation, which he calls geotheology
a concept borrowed from the older geographer John K.
Wright--served as lenses through which many
migration decisions were made.
migrations to Ireland in the seventeenth century
were precipitated by overpopulation and economic
hardships, especially those that struck South-
western Scotland. Cultural geographer Barry Aron
Vann challenges that assessment. He unravels the
complex assemblage of push and pull factors that
played roles in seventeenth-century Scottish
migrations. Space of Time or Distance of Place is an apt title
for his book. Those words were part of a letter
written by the Scottish born and educated Rev Robert
Blair (1593-1666) to his Glasgow University mentor.
Blair, as a key religious leader of a Scottish
community living in seventeenth-century Ireland,
demonstrated that he remained a member of an
imagined community that Vann calls the Melvillian
Scottish ecclesiastical intelligentsia. Vann
uniquely demonstrates how religious thought worlds
tied to space and nation, which he calls geotheology
a concept borrowed from the older geographer John K.
Wright--served as lenses through which many
migration decisions were made.