Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Eric Richards highlights the fact that there was nothing unique about the clearances. 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.
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.
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Professor James Hunter is director of the Centre for History, University of the Highlands and Islands. He is the author of 12 books about the Highlands including A Dance Called America, The Making of the Crofting Community and On the Other Side of Sorrow: Nature and People in the Scottish Highlands. He was the first director of the Scottish Crofters Union. He also chaired Highlands and Islands Enterprise, the north of Scotland’s development agency.
