The Highland Clearances and the British Empire
The Highland Clearances were the systematic eviction of tenants from the Scottish Highlands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Between roughly 1750 and 1860, perhaps 70,000 people were forced from their homes, and perhaps 1.5 million Highlanders emigrated, the great majority of them to North America, Australia, or the cities of Lowland Scotland. The clearances were carried out by Highland landlords, many of them absentee, who found it more profitable to replace the traditional mixed farming of the Highlanders with sheep runs. The clearances were, in this respect, a transformation of the Scottish Highlands in the interest of agricultural capitalism. They were also, as Eric Richards has argued in his masterly A History of the Highland Clearances (2000), one of the clearest cases in British history of “agrarian transformation with minimal social cost.” That the social cost was, in fact, enormous, and that the transformation was made possible by the existence of the British Empire, makes the clearances a part of the imperial story as well as a part of Scottish history.
The Highlanders and the British State
The Scottish Highlands were, in the eighteenth century, a distinctive society within the British state. The Highlanders spoke Gaelic, adhered to a clan system that combined kinship, land tenure, and military obligation, and practiced a form of mixed farming that combined cattle, sheep, oats, and the now-famous potato. The Highlanders had been among the most loyal subjects of the British Crown after the 1745 Jacobite rising, and the Highland regiments had distinguished themselves in the Seven Years’ War and in the American Revolution. The British state, in return, had developed a complex relationship with the Highland chiefs, who combined traditional authority with modern landlordism.
The 1745 rising, however, was a serious shock to the British state. The Jacobite army, under Charles Edward Stuart (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”), had penetrated as far south as Derby before being turned back at the Battle of Culloden in April 1746. The British response, embodied in the Heritable Jurisdictions Act of 1746 and the Disarming Act of the same year, was a systematic attempt to dismantle the clan system. The traditional powers of the chiefs — the right to hold courts, to raise armies, to administer justice — were abolished. The chiefs became landlords, and the clansmen became tenants at will.
The Economic Transformation
The transformation of the Highland economy began in the late eighteenth century. The introduction of sheep farming, particularly the breeding of black-faced sheep from the south of Scotland, was initially a marginal activity, but it gradually displaced the traditional mixed farming. The reasons were economic. Sheep were more profitable than mixed farming, particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century when the price of wool rose with the expansion of the textile industry. The British state’s military requirements also favoured the production of woollen cloth, particularly for the army. The Highland landlords, faced with the choice between mixed farming and sheep runs, increasingly chose sheep runs.
The first major clearance took place in 1783–1784 in the Strath of Kildonan in Sutherland, when the Countess of Sutherland evicted perhaps 600 tenants to make way for sheep. The clearance was conducted with a degree of violence that became characteristic of the practice: the tenants’ houses were burned, their cattle impounded, and their grain stores destroyed. The clearances, however, were not always violent. Many tenants were induced to emigrate by offers of free passage to North America, and many simply left when the pressure of the landlord became unbearable.
The Sutherland Clearances and the Statistical Account
The most notorious of the clearances were the Sutherland Clearances of 1810s and 1820s, carried out by the Countess of Sutherland (Elizabeth, the wife of the Marquess of Stafford, later the 1st Duke of Sutherland) and her factor, Patrick Sellar. The clearances were carried out in 1814, 1819, and 1820, and they affected perhaps 10,000 people. Sellar was tried for culpable homicide in 1816 for his role in the clearances, but he was acquitted — the trial was widely seen as a travesty, and Sellar’s acquittal became a byword for the injustice of the British legal system in the Highlands.
The clearances were defended by the Countess of Sutherland and her supporters in terms that would become familiar in the imperial context. The traditional Highlanders, it was argued, were living in poverty, and the introduction of sheep farming would improve the productivity of the land and bring prosperity to the Highlands. The clearances would also reduce the population pressure on the land and allow the remaining Highlanders to enjoy a higher standard of living. The displaced Highlanders, it was said, would find better lives in the colonies of the British Empire. As the Countess of Sutherland wrote in 1815: “The great object of the proprietors of the Highlands should be to convert the country from a state of barbarism to a state of civilization.”
The Emigration
The great majority of the displaced Highlanders emigrated. The principal destinations were North America (particularly the Maritime provinces of Canada, where perhaps 50,000 Highlanders settled in the early nineteenth century), the United States, Australia, and the cities of Lowland Scotland. The emigration was often organised by the landlords, who paid the passage of their tenants in exchange for their departure. The emigrants travelled in conditions of considerable hardship, and the mortality on the voyages was high.
The emigrant ships became a target of the British humanitarian campaign of the 1830s and 1840s. The Test of 1840, which required emigrant ships to carry a surgeon, and the Passenger Acts of the 1840s and 1850s, which regulated the conditions on board, were responses to the high mortality on the emigrant ships. The most notorious case was the Highland Mary, which sailed from Thurso in 1851 and arrived in Australia after a voyage in which almost half the passengers died. The Highland Mary was not, in fact, a Highland ship — the passengers were mostly from the Scottish Lowlands — but the name captured the association between Highland emigration and high mortality.
The Highlanders in the Empire
The Highlanders who emigrated took their Gaelic culture with them. Gaelic-speaking communities were established in Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, Ontario, and other parts of North America; in Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand; and in the cities of Lowland Scotland, particularly Glasgow. The Highland diaspora has been, in that sense, one of the most extensive cultural diasporas in British history, and it is still visible in the Gaelic-speaking communities of the Maritime provinces of Canada and in the Highland Games of New Zealand and Australia.
The Highlanders also served in the British army in disproportionate numbers. The Highland regiments — the Black Watch, the Seaforth Highlanders, the Cameron Highlanders, the Gordon Highlanders, and others — were among the most distinguished units of the British army, and they were deployed in every major British campaign of the nineteenth century, from the Napoleonic Wars through the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the Zulu War, the Boer War, and the First World War. The Highland soldier was, in this context, one of the principal instruments of British imperial expansion, and the Highland soldier was, in significant part, a product of the clearances that had displaced the traditional Highlanders from their land.
The End of the Clearances
The clearances gradually came to an end in the second half of the nineteenth century. The introduction of deer forests, which required less labour than sheep farms, produced a new wave of clearances in the 1840s and 1850s. The most famous of these was the clearance of the island of St Kilda in 1853, in which the entire population of the island was evacuated, mostly to Australia. The Clearance of Knoydart in 1853, in which a community of crofters in the west Highlands was evicted to make way for a sheep farm, was one of the last of the major clearances and one of the most controversial.
The Crofting Act of 1886, which provided security of tenure for crofters and established the Crofters’ Commission, was the principal legislative response to the clearances. The Act did not abolish the clearances, but it made them more difficult and more expensive. The crofting system, in the twentieth century, became a distinctive feature of the Highland economy, and it has survived into the twenty-first century as a working agricultural system. The clearances, in this light, did not abolish the Highland way of life. They transformed it.
Historiographical Note
The historiography of the Highland Clearances has been substantially revised since the 1990s. The older Scottish nationalist tradition, of which the work of John Prebble in The Highland Clearances (1963) and the popular account by Michael Fry is representative, treated the clearances as a deliberate act of ethnic cleansing carried out by absentee landlords against the Highlanders. The more recent scholarship, of which Eric Richards’s A History of the Highland Clearances (2000) is the most comprehensive statement, has been more nuanced. The clearances, on this more recent view, were the result of a complex set of economic, political, and demographic pressures; they were not, in the main, the result of deliberate ethnic cleansing. The landlords were often brutal, but they were also responding to genuine economic pressures. The highland emigration, in this more recent view, was a more complex phenomenon than the older nationalist tradition allowed. The current generation of historians, of whom the work of Tom Devine, James Hunter, and the contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History are representative, has produced a more integrated picture of the clearances as part of the broader British and imperial history.