Uncovers the failed Victorian-era plan to transplant Scottish crofters into British Columbian settlements.

At the height of the Victorian age, governments on both sides of the Atlantic targeted Scottish crofters from the Outer Hebrides as ideal colonists, proposing settlement schemes in British Columbia and on the prairies that were to bring benefits to 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 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, and disagreements over imperial decline and state interventionism.

The apparent failure of transplanted Scots to meet expectations—that they would save the region from foreign and Indigenous threats—prompted late Victorians to re-examine issues of religion, race, class, gender, Britishness, and modernity itself. Forest’s deft analysis expands our understanding of imperialist assumptions and settler colonialism.