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, this is an account of how the Highlands and Islands of Scotland evolved into the way they are today. But the book is not simply the story of humanity's millennium-long involvement with one of the world's most spectacular localities. It is also a contribution to the present-day debate about how Scotland - and Britain - should be organized. 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, he maintains, by mediaeval Scotland's monarchy, by 17th-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 over their own destinies. The more recent history of the Highlands and Islands, in Hunter's opinion, has consisted mainly of attempts by the region's people to regain freedom and rights - including rights to land - of which they were deprived in the Middle Ages and afterwards. Today those attempts are succeeding and, this book argues, ought to be encouraged by Scotland's new government. If it is to do better by the Highlands and Islands than Scottish governments of the past, it will have to see that devolution of political power does not stop in Edinburgh.