Eric Richards, The Highland Clearances (2000, 2008)

Didn’t think I’d sit down and read this cover to cover – you’d think it would become repetitive as he takes each locality in turn, but he draws on such a wide range of information that he manages to show the particular features of each situation, and each tragedy emerges as unique.

This is a book that had to wait for its time to be written – there is a universal loathing of the Highland landlord class and their agents, the factors, so Richards is a brave man, even now, to attempt an even-handed treatment of the Highland Clearances. Without in any way detracting from the dreadfulness of what happened to the evicted families, he challenges the reader to say what else the landlords could have done to manage their over-populated, poverty-stricken estates. Indeed, it emerges from his detailed accounts that the most inhuman clearances were those carried out by trustees after landlords had bankrupted themselves trying to maintain the population through the famines of the mid 19^th century. (Notwithstanding the violence of the Sutherland clearances, the people were provided with somewhere else to go.)

One surprising thing is the amount of capital (fortunes made in the Empire or brought in through marriage) that was sunk uselessly in attempts to establish manufacturing and fishing industries in the Highlands. The fickle herring moved elsewhere. Kelp was a success for a time, but was replaced by imported chemicals.

The story of these recurrent failures is instructive in the sense that they provide a measure of the difficulties which confronted and broke even the best motivated, most prosperous, and most humane of landlords. (p.411)

Ultimately, sheep farming and deer stalking were the only activities that brought an economic return for Highland landlords.

Richards points out that the same process of clearance went on all over Europe, with the small peasants being pushed off the land as commons were enclosed and large farms created. (In fact, Tom Devine has coined the term ‘Lowland Clearances’ to encourage people to see the Agricultural Revolution in Lowland Scotland through this sympathetic lens.) Towards the end of the book, Richards quotes Jeanette Neeson’s Commoners on the English Enclosures: “‘The sense of loss, the sense of robbery could last forever as the bitter inheritance of the rural poor’” (p.405). This might seem an exaggeration in the English context, where there seems little folk memory of the peasant past, but it is still the English countryside that defines whatever ethnic consciousness the English have.

What was exceptional, then, about the Highland Clearances? This is a theme that runs through the book. One answer is their scale, with whole settlements being emptied at once – though this was not the only type of clearance, and much of the eviction was piecemeal and not dissimilar to rural depopulation elsewhere. However, the late arrival of agricultural change in the Highlands meant that the blow fell harder and more suddenly than in many other places.

The distinctive social system of the Highlands, the patterns, of local authority, its unusual priorities in the utilisation of its landed resources and the geography itself, all joined to render the Highlands less able to accommodate the urgency for change which descended on all quarters of western Europe in the late eighteenth century. (pp.41-42)

One puzzle that Richards doesn’t manage to solve, though he states the problem with his usual clarity, is why the population of the Highlands expanded so quickly from the late 18^th century on, especially in the least favoured agricultural regions, the west and north. He is resolutely unsentimental, and doubts whether the land could have sustained the people even if it had been made over into their ownership. And there would still have been a large body of landless cottars and squatters, almost invisible to the historical record.

Then there was the near-destruction of a whole culture and way of life – though that, as Richards points out, has as much to do with Culloden and its aftermath as with the Clearances.

Another compelling answer is the anachronistic survival of a culture that was, though Richards doesn’t put it this way, basically tribal in its relationship with the land. The tribal leaders had only fairly recently reinvented themselves as property owners, and their right in law to evict their tenants were at odds with a persisting sense of the clan’s customary right to the tribal territory. It was the old moral economy that eventually reasserted itself, against the whole flow of history, in the Crofters Act. As Richards says, “Ultimately, the story has always been about who should possess and control the uses of the land” (p.xiv).