A Higher World: Scotland 1707–1815 by Michael Fry

Author:Michael Fry [Fry, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Europe, Great Britain, scotland, social history, Modern, 18th Century
ISBN: 9780857908322
Google: hCclEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
Published: 2014-11-01T00:08:33.846524+00:00

The linguistic renewal showed how economic and cultural improvement might interact to benefit the people, so long as the Highlands preserved the peace and good order attained only within living memory. As political boss of Scotland, Dundas was not so naïve as to think peace and good order came of themselves; they had to be fostered, even imposed on a region still in the throes of profound long-term transformation. Yet this should not turn into counterproductive tyranny. On a crucial point at issue in 1792 the Lord Advocate voiced the dilemmas. In reporting unrest to Dundas, he begged leave to point out how the spread of sheep-farming was ‘a measure very unpopular in those Highland districts where sheep are not yet introduced, as it tends to remove the inhabitants on those estates from their small possessions and dwelling houses’. This was, surely, an expression of sympathy for the peasants who became victims of improvement – if not, of course, for any illegality in resisting it on their part.63

Gaeldom was not inevitably doomed. But its social structures did need to change for it to survive and flourish, just as Lowland social structures were changing. An essential impetus to that had emerged in the undermining of the traditional subsistence economy by markets. In parts of the Highlands, people already made a living from the cattle they sold outside the region, rather than attempting to remain self-sufficient on patches of poor soil. This was a new system of extensive pastoral agriculture, where capitalist farmers employed landless labourers – and it survives yet, in reasonable condition, to the east of the Great Glen. Yet to the west and north, that was not how things worked out. Instead the traditional subsistence economy survived, little affected by markets. There was no extensive pastoral agriculture, but a system of individual smallholdings which grew smaller and smaller still as the tenants subdivided their plots to accommodate their ever increasing population. Rather it was the big farmers, the tacksmen, that vanished from this scene, to leave a society of peasants barely able to support themselves from their distressingly meagre resources. And so the groundwork was laid for the harrowing Highland crises of the nineteenth century.

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