T.M.Devine (2019) The Scottish Clearances. A History of the Dispossessed.

Some might think that inflicting the moron’s moron, Donald J.Trump, on an innocent world is payback for the Holocaust of the Highland clearances. But Scottish historian T.M.Devine takes a more nuanced view. He studies what records are available to differentiate between what happened in the Highlands and Island and compare it with Lowland Scotland. A History of the Dispossessed answers some questions, but reveals others.

Devine follows traditional methods of setting forth hypotheses and showing his workings. The oft-quoted—but not quoted enough, when dealing with the moron’s moron and his followers—words of economist John Maynard Keynes apply: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind’. (And not the facts.)

Devine acknowledges in his Introduction the growing romanticism and mythology of the noble Highlander, a separate and purer race living in crags and glens, uncorrupted by modernity and from which the shock troops of the British Empire was drawn. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert certainly thought so with their own piper on hand and a mania for all things tartan. He quotes from Sir Walter Scott’s novel, Waverley, published in 1814, which looks back 60 years to the Jacobite rising 1745-6.

‘There is no European nation which, within the course of half a century or little more, has undergone so complete a change as the kingdom of Scotland…

The increase of wealth and extension of commerce, have since united to render the present people of Scotland a class of beings as different from their grandparents as the existing English are from Queen Elizabeth’s time.’

Those that owned the land, owned the people on the land. That remained unchanged. James Kennedy, The Highland Crofter, best describes what it was to be poor and to be the property of an often absent landlord.

 Frae Kenmore to Ben More

The land is a’ the Marquis’s;

 

The mossy howes, the heathery knowe

An’ like bonnie park is his;

The bearded goats, the towsie stots,

An’ a’ the braxie carcasses;

Ilk crofter’s rent, ilk tinker’s tent,

An ilka collie’s bark is his;

The muir-cock’s craw, the piper’s blaw,

The ghillies hard day’s wark is his;

From Kenymore tae Ben More

The warld is a’ the Marquis’s.

 

The fish that swim, the birds that skim,

The fir, the ash, the birk is his;

The castle ha’ sae big and braw,

Yon diamond crusted dirk is his;

The roofless hame, a burning shame,

The factor’s dirty wark is his;

The poor folk vexed, the lawyer’s text,

Yon smirking legal shark is his;

From Kenmore to Ben More

The world is a’ the Marquis.

 

But near, mair near, God’s voice we hear

The dawn as weel’s the dark is his;

The poet’s dream, the patriot’s theme,

The fire that light the mirk is His

They clearly show God’s mills are slow

But sure, the handiwork is His;

And in His grace our hope we place,

Fair Freedom sheltering ark is His;

The men that toil should own the soil,

A note as clear as the lark is this;

Breadalbane’s land –the fair, the grand –

Will no’ be aye the Marquis’s.

A note of defiance Devine finds largely missing from the records of the Highland and Island clearances. Certainly compared to similar clearances that took place in the Lowlands, but earlier in which leveller communities fought back and were less likely to be persecuted. They, for example, levelled dykes put up by landlords on what was once common pasture. The diaspora of Lowland cotters and poor rural workers went however largely unreported as cities expanded and they became part of the urban proletariat or emigrated seeking land—and freedom from rent-racking landlords—the British colonies, predominantly America and what is now Canada.

Like Ireland, the initial emigrants, were those with capital as trans-Atlantic fares were out with the reach of most. Sail to steamship brought prices down as did horsepower to railways.    

The potato famine magnified the problems of subletting land in a subsistence economy in which the people that added value to the land were regarded as a pestilence and a problem to be solved.

In ‘A Winter of Starvation,’ George Pole visited Barra on 13^th January 1847. He was a representative of the Crown and had experience working in Ireland. His experience of Barra was similar. ‘Nearly every scrap of arable land had been given over to potatoes.’

The Irish Gael and the Scottish Gael were herded onto coffin ships is a popular trope with a large measure of truth. The leading figures of the British establishment regarded both as feckless and lazy, sub-human beings, one step down or up from the ape, with an inability to speak proper English. Newspapers such as the Glasgow Herald took much the same tone. But not all landlords behaved in the way the majority of absent landlords did in Ireland. Ethnic clearance akin to genocide was largely avoided in Scotland for a number of interconnected reasons to do with industrialisation and the demand for labour growing as we became the workshop of the world in which the British Empire played a large part.  

The agrarian revolution in Lowland Scotland has happened earlier and was smoothed over by historians. The dispossessed merged into common invisibility.  

From The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil to Mel Gibson’s Braveheart cartoon history and violence, ‘They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom’, is ironically remade and remarketed as The Patriot but on the other side of the Atlantic. Scottish Highlanders and their ancestors were fighting for both the Crown and against the Crown—‘give me liberty or give me death...’

Death always wins, even by default. The luxury goods in the 1850s of sugar and tobacco with the humble potato in the Highlands and Island were the mainstay of most family life by the 1950s—certainly in my house. Read on.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6