James Hunter on The Highland Clearances

You've chosen five books about the Highland clearances. What got you interested int he subject in the first place?

I grew up in Argyll, in a little place called Duror, south of Ballachulish. The first I heard of the Highland clearances was from my grandfather – my mother’s father, whose name was John Cameron. He lived with us when I was a child, and died when I was 13 or 14. I was interested in history at school, and went on to study it at university, but what got me thinking about Highland history was reading John Prebble’s book "Glencoe: The Story of the Massacre." That was what made me think for the first time that there was a history of the Highlands. Because before then I had tended to think of history as being the foreign policy of Queen Elizabeth I, the Reformation, or some such thing. But when I went to university there was very little Scottish history included in the degree, and what little there was seemed to me to be coming from a very different perspective to that of my grandfather. So I went on to Edinburgh to do a PhD, and that PhD evolved into my book The Making of the Crofting Community. What I was trying to demonstrate was that you could write a history of the Highland clearances and subsequent events that was both academically reputable – in that it was well-sourced and based on research and archives – and also truer, as I thought, anyway, to the standpoint of the people in the Highlands than a lot of other academic history.

What areas of the Highlands were the worst affected?

Well the area that everybody has heard about is Sutherland. But in some ways what happened in Sutherland was quite untypical. The clearances in Sutherland were conducted on behalf of the Sutherland family, which was at that time one of the wealthiest, if not the wealthiest, family in the whole of the United Kingdom. It was meant to result in the complete redevelopment of the Sutherland economy by giving over the interior to sheep farmers and settling the people cleared on the coast, where they would become fishermen and the like. It didn’t work and became quite notorious, partly because of the eminence of the landowning family involved.

But while the clearances in Sutherland were at their height in the second decade of the 19th century, around 1815, the clearances of the late 1840s and early 1850s – in places like South Uist and Barra – were far worse in terms of sheer brutality. By that point the landowners had lost all conviction that there was any future for the people they were removing and they were just shovelling them out.

The landlord of Barra, South Uist and Benbecula was a man called John Gordon of Cluny, who had bought the estate from the Clanranalds when they went bust in the 1830s. Gordon just wanted rid of people, and there was famine in the Highlands, just as in Ireland, in the 1840s, so people were leaving in appalling conditions and being shipped at his expense to Canada and dumped on the quayside. Canadian immigration officials, who were at that time dealing with the refugees from the Irish famine, said they’d never seen people in a worse state than the folk who came from the Uists. Some of them almost literally had no clothes.

This must have had a huge effect on the Scottish culture and Gaelic language.

Well, it’s bound up with the much wider disintegration of the traditional society of the Highlands. There were all sorts of external forces operating on clanship long before the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, but with the defeat at Culloden in 1746 all of that accelerated, so you had the commercialization of agriculture and of the land structure, the former chieftains turned into landlords, and the whole society went into disintegration. So apart from the fact that people are being removed through brutality and hardship, there was a huge sense of cultural disorientation.

One of the reasons that I recommended a couple of books by Eric Richards is that Richards is very good at highlighting the fact that there was nothing unique about this. That it was a manifestation, in the context of the Highlands and Islands, of something that was happening at the same time and has happened subsequently in many other parts of the world: the collision between modern, commercial capitalism and more traditional society.

His book Patrick Sellar and the Highland Clearances is about a fascinating character. Sellar was one of the factors of the Sutherland estate and a sheep farmer himself. Sellar had a very well worked-out view as to what he was about. His justification was that he was bringing civilization and enlightenment to where previously there had only been darkness and barbarity. And that was exactly what people thought who were taking the British Empire into Africa, or American civilization across the prairies.

Eric Richards’ book publishes letters from Sellar which are full of idealism – he seems very proud of what he’s doing.

Sellar made quite a bit of the fact that one of his own forebears had been a small crofter or peasant farmer in Morayshire and had been removed from the land. Sellar was a lawyer by profession and thought that he had, as it were, risen into the professional class as a result of what had happened to his grandfather or great-grandfather – that he had been kicked out of his croft. He thought, genuinely, I believe, that while what was happening to the people he was evicting might be harsh and horrible, they, or if not them then certainly their children and grandchildren, would actually thank him for it – for having spared them the horrors of continuing to be crofters in Sutherland!

There’s a huge Scottish diaspora as a result of the clearances.