A History of the British Isles by Kenneth L. Campbell

Author:Kenneth L. Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

The Highland Clearances and Scotland in the early nineteenth century

When absentee landlords started to take over the Highland estates from the clan chiefs who had been dispossessed after the Battle of Culloden, tenants in the Highlands slowly started to migrate from the area, especially after 1770. After the French Revolution, those tenants who remained began to organize into political associations similar to those that were springing up in other parts of the British Isles. Between the economic interests of the landlords, who wished to force peasants off the land so that they could use them for grazing sheep, and the political authorities who were concerned with the rebellious ethos of the peasantry, the motivation for the forced removal of Highland tenants was well in place by the beginning of the nineteenth century.

During this epoch, rural society in Scotland underwent a dramatic transformation that included a massive exodus of people from the Highlands and a shift in the status of many Lowland farmers from tenants to agricultural labourers. As in Ireland, and to some extent in England, Scottish political agitation increased during the 1790s. The Society of United Scotsmen was the Scottish equivalent of the United Irishmen. A riot in the small southeastern town of Tranent in 1797, which resulted in at least a dozen deaths at the hands of the authorities, was partially provoked by rumours that Scotland was about to be subjected to compulsory military service. These concerns need to be understood against a backdrop that included political agitation associated with the revolutionary decade, continued Scottish disaffection with the union, and the depopulation of the country, which needed its people for other jobs.

Sir Walter Scott was among those who romanticized the Highlands to such a degree that they soon became a part of Scottish identity as a whole. Tartans and kilts became ubiquitous symbols of Scotland, as they still are, despite the fact that it was an Englishman who invented the kilt in the 1720s. Scott has been criticized for his romantic treatment of Scottish history instead of calling attention to the contemporary plight of Highland society. Scott provided a revisionist account of the 1745 rebellion in his prototypical historical novel, Waverley (1814). Scott would not have been likely to have supported the Jacobite rebellions, committed as he was to the union and the Hanoverian dynasty, but he could romanticize the ’45 from the safe distance of the early nineteenth century precisely because he knew that the Jacobite threat had ceased to exist. In doing so, he helped to forge a single Scottish identity, even if it was not one with which every Scot would have acquiesced. But Scott also truly believed that something was lost with the defeat of the Jacobites and the subsequent obliteration of Highland society; he wrote in his postscript to Waverley that ‘the most romantic parts of this narrative are precisely those which have a foundation in fact’.

A few years later, in The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Scott included some urban riot scenes that made rural or Highland life look appealing by comparison.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.