There are three things often overlooked when discussing the "Clearences" or the "Famine".

The first has been touched on, and that was the Europe-wide failure of the potato crop. Not just in Ireland, or Scotland, but throughout the whole of Europe the crop drastically failed. Millions more starved in Europe than in Scotland and Ireland combined.

The second thing that is often overlooked, and in my opinion this "omission" is usually politically driven, is the fact that there was no government system of welfare relief anywhere in the world at that time. The whole of Europe relied on Christian compassion, and unfortunately there just wasn't enough to go around. The wealth of Scotland and Ireland was centered in the cities, and it was to these cities that the hungry masses dragged themselves in the hopes of finding food and employment.

As cities became overcrowded the hungry were turned away. The question was, "where to go?" In the case of the Irish many went to England and Scotland; according to the the 1851 Census, nearly 20% of the population of Glasgow was born in Ireland. The same was true for Dundee on the opposite side of the country. Cities in Britain, such as Liverpool, were also flooded with a tidal wave of Irish. According to the most reliable estimates, more Irish went to Britain than left for the New World.

And what of the Scots?

Crop failures and a shift in land ownership away from the Lairds and into the hands of London based "Companies" forced many rural Scots into the cities in what became a desperate hunt for work, with the native-born Scots and recently arrived Irish competing for the same scant opportunities to earn enough to feed their families. Something had to give, and it was these recently displaced Scots who moved to the New World. Plenty of work and free land for farming drew them like a lodestone to the opportunities across the vast oceans of the world.

The last thing that many people overlook when discussing the root causes of the mass migrations from Ireland and Scotland in the first half of the 19th century are the two things that always seem to be with us: War and Taxes.

I recently read a report by the Internal Revenue Service indicating that the top 10% of wage earners in the United States now pay 60% of the total income taxes received by the US government. The same was true in Great Britain at the beginning of the 19th century. The land owning class accounted for more than 50% of all tax revenues received by the government (the rest was derived from tariffs, duties, and import taxes).

To recover the costs of the war in America, as well as the Napoleonic wars, the British government cranked up the taxes on the land owners until finally they reached the breaking point. Faced with the dual spectres of bankruptcy and land seizure, many land owners leased their estates in Scotland to "companies" based in London and Liverpool who agreed to meet the tax burden and pay a stipend to the Laird, after deducting their administrative costs. (The same happened in Ireland where estates were leased or sold to "Gombeen" men, merchant-speculators in Dublin, Cork and Limerick.)

While this sounded good to desperate, cash strapped landowners, it became a license to steal for the Companies. And steal they did. By structuring payments to the landowners as "loans" they were quickly able to encumber the estates with so much debt that they were able to force the "sale" by the owner for mere pennies on the pound.

Once they were in possession of the land, the Companies were in a position to turn a profit, something they didn't hesitate to do, even if it meant the wholesale eviction of those who tenanted the land. Which, to hear the telling of it, makes Thomas Dixon Jr's novel of the re-construction of the post-civil war South seem positively enlightened.

But then the "telling" of anything always seems to be more widely received than the actual facts of the matter. As long as we are humans, we will be given to passion more than reason.