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Am Bratach No. 194
BOOKENDS by Kevin Crowe Eric Richards: “Debating the Highland Clearances”. Edinburgh University Press, 2007. £16.99. Few aspects of Scottish history raise more heated debates than the Highland Clearances. Not only has there, over the years, been every conceivable opinion expressed, criticised and defended, but there is a lack of consensus on exactly when the Clearances occurred and what the conditions were for a particular episode to be classed as a “clearance”. A few have even attempted to deny that the Clearances occurred at all. Despite the apparent wealth of material, many commentators seem to present more rhetoric than hard fact. In some ways, this is inevitable. The people who, for whatever reason, left the glens to make way for sheep, spoke Gaelic; very few of them had any English, and even fewer could read and write. With a few exceptions, their stories are told through the oral tradition. So the mass of written records were from the hands of those who owned and controlled the land, or from those who acted in their interests. And yet, over the years a literature did develop that condemned the Clearances and those who inflicted them on the Highlands. Most notable in the nineteenth century were Donald MacLeod and Alexander MacKenzie. The Napier Commission in the 1880s recommended security of tenure for crofters so that they could not be evicted from their land in the future. In the twentieth century, commentators such as Prebble and Grimble condemned the clearances in highly polemical works. In later years, Hunter and Richards tried, from widely different perspectives, to inject some academic rigour into the debates. Others, such as Fry, have argued that talk of “Clearances” makes little sense when during this period the population of the Highlands increased. Out of this mass of often contradictory and sometimes confusing material, Richards has produced what is arguably the most important work on the subject for years. The author of several key works on the Clearances, including a biography of Patrick Sellar, Richards brings all of his formidable analytical talent to this book. It is divided into two sections, the first of which looks at the debate. He provides a brief history of the time before, during and after what is known as the Clearances, distinguishing between those emigrations opposed by the landlords (who during parts of the eighteenth century tried to stop people leaving), those actively supported by them, and those they initiated. None of this is new, but the succinct and accessible way he presents this overview is impressive. Even more important is the way he places the Clearances in the historical, economic and social contexts of the times. To talk about the radical changes taking place in agricultural production throughout Western Europe, including the enclosures in England, is not to belittle the Clearances, but rather to show how they were a part of a social and economic revolution underpinned by major philosophical ideas, many of which came out of the Scottish Enlightenment. Landlords in the Highlands faced economic pressures and, as elsewhere, were influenced by the major theorists of their time. Thus the ideas of the economist Adam Smith began to take hold. This approach enables Richards to make some imaginative connections. So, for example, the tactic of burning the houses of those cleared wasn’t just (or even) the result of evil, but was the practical application of economist Malthus’ influential work on population growth, and how to halt it. The second half of the book consists of documents, arranged chronologically, from a 1746 Hanoverian blueprint for the Highlands to reports from the early twentieth century. These range from letters, reports, parliamentary committees, books, other written sources, and crucially also from the oral tradition. Each document is introduced, placing it in context. Reading these takes us back to the debates as they raged at the time, and give us an insight into the motives and beliefs of the participants. This is to the good. By acknowledging that, for example, Patrick Sellar was an ordinary human being, rather than merely an evil monster, we can see beyond the man to the prevailing economic forces. The understanding thus gained can then in turn help us analyse more effectively our own times, and this surely is one of the key tasks of history. Further, we see the way those writing at a distance use the Clearances for their own political ends, whether it be Sismondi, Marx or Beecher Stowe. This too has resonance and relevance today. |