Scotland’s darkest days
ANNIE TINDLEY recommends a thought-provoking book revealing the wider story behind the Highland clearances The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed 1600–1900 by TM Devine Allen Lane, 496 pages, £25
In the popular imagination, the clearances are the great tragic blot on Scotland’s past. It’s a tale of heartless landowners engineering suffering and extirpation by forcing a people and culture from their lands and homes in a process some writers have compared to ethnic cleansing and even genocide. The clearances have become one of the most (in)famous episodes in the story of modern Scotland, and even those who are unfamiliar with the nation’s history may well know a little about what happened in this turbulent period.
The clearances are taken to signal the end of clanship and paternal landownership, at exactly the same time as the cult of tartan, kilted regiments and the fine, dramatic landscapes of the north moved centre stage in British culture. These clearances were, of course, of Highlanders and it is the Highland clearances that have dominated the way in which this story is remembered today. In his new volume, however, TM Devine takes a different approach. Spanning three centuries, from 1600 to 1900, his book marries an analysis of the more famous Highland clearances with those that occurred all over lowland Scotland, often well in advance of what happened further north. The major imbalance between the volume of historical writing on the Highland versus the lowland clearances is something Devine highlights as a significant problem and one he has sought to rectify previously. Through this, he presents a rounded picture of rural revolution and the advent of capitalism in rural society.
Devine is probably best known as the author of substantial works on the history of modern Scotland. He has studied Glasgow’s 18th-century tobacco barons, the industrial revolution, and Scottish contributions to the British empire. He has also been writing about rural Scotland for many decades, as the useful bibliography in this volume highlights. In this latest book, Devine brings all this work together to address a period when many of Scotland’s people were subjected to coercive change, and when traditional relationships were overturned and replaced by the ‘rational’ exploitation of land use, as defined by the radical ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment.
As the nearly 500 pages suggest, this is an ambitious book, large both in scope and coverage. Happily for the reader, it is very clearly organised, and written in an engaging and fluent style. Devine doesn’t overburden the text with references, and takes the reader’s hand to lead them through the prickly jungle of clearance and dispossession.
The story is divided into three parts. The first acts as an introduction, painting a picture of Scottish rural society before the tumultuous changes
Even today, the clearances are seen as the great tragic blot on Scotland’s past
brought about by capitalism. Devine is at pains to point out that rural Scotland was never static, and that simplistic understandings of a primitive but content and unchanging rural society have no place here. The second part looks in detail at the “forgotten history” of the lowland clearances, using a close reading of estates’ papers to understand why, how and with what consequences these were carried out. Just a glance at the many maps included gives the reader a sense of the scale and scope of these dispossessions, so often neglected by historians. The final part looks north and west to the more famous Highland clearances, linking these sometimes familiar episodes and arguments to the evidence uncovered in the lowlands to give the reader a coherent and rounded picture of all Scottish rural life in the period.
The Scottish Clearances aims to provide us with a macro-level view of what happened and is richly supported with all kinds of evidence, from estates’ papers, state records, correspondence, and the records of observers and critics, through to poetry, fiction and drama. Devine notes throughout that it is important but difficult to capture the lived experience of the clearances – the pain, anxiety and suffering that must have been experienced by the many thousands of people directly affected. Although he does attempt this, the overall emphasis is on the bigger picture, with a significant slant towards economic and political drivers. It is, nonetheless, an important and balanced book, highlighting a transformative period of Scotland’s history, one that retains a powerful hold on the nation’s political, economic and cultural character to this day.
The scale and scope of these dispossessions has been neglected by historians