The Clearances

[ThistleDown]

I think that if one is going to frame the causes of the Highland clearances solely in terms of some sort of "post Culloden" Highland experience, then I'd have to reluctantly agree with Henry Ford's oft quoted line that "history is bunk". For some land owners the clearances were due, in great measure, to an economic shift in government policy occasioned in part by the staggering costs of the Napoleonic Wars. In other words, taxes. Agrarian blight on a scale comparable to that in Ireland also played its role in the depopulation of the Highlands and also in other parts of rural Scotland.

While it is popular to blame the clearances on "greedy land owners", to the point that this anti-land owing mantra has achieved an almost theological status, the real causes go far beyond the actions of a few factors acting on the instructions of those in control of encumbered estates.

I'm sorry, but "pop histories" and novels about the plight of "the poor Highlander" -- as emotionally stirring as they may be -- are as poor a substitute for real, in depth, history as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" would be if one wanted to actually know the root causes of the American war between the States.

Two better sources for the history of that lengthy emigration process than those popular writers who regurgitate the romantic belief in the cruel and uncaring land owner: Prof J'M Bumsted's "The People's Clearnce, 1770-1815" and Prof R.A. Dodgshon's "From Chiefs to Landlords". The first finds fault with the tale of an oppressed, impoverished peasantry driven off the estates to make way for sheep. The second shifts the emphasis from the popular notion of a lawless warrior society to the far more realistic and understandable one of relationship changes between chiefs and their tenant-clients, development of new farming systems, production strategies and marketing methods.

Bumsted and Dodgshon both claim the clearances were far more protracted than the period 1745 to 1820 and had their roots in the mid-17C, if not earlier. They don't ignore those landlords who forcibly evicted their tenants, but insist that this process long preceded the '45 in many parts of the Highlands and happened not at all in just as many parts during the so-called clearance years.