The Highland Clearances & Diaspora

1. Scope and evidence: dispossession without a single national plan

The Highland Clearances were not a single government decree or one uniform event. They were a long, uneven process of eviction, compulsory relocation and sometimes coerced emigration across the Highlands and Islands. Sheep farming, commercial estate management, the collapse of coastal industries and famine all mattered, but their importance changed by place and decade. Documented cruelty must not be diluted into a story of harmless modernisation; regional variation must not be erased by a story of one centrally directed conspiracy.

The core events are established in estate papers, court proceedings, contemporary reports and tenant testimony. Historians debate the scale, the relationship between economic pressure and coercion, and the meaning of the Clearances as a whole. This article therefore distinguishes eviction from emigration, reported testimony from a judicial finding, and regional population decline from a count of people cleared. Its main period is c.1750–1860, with an outlook to crofting reform in 1886 and later community ownership.

The Scottish diaspora is wider than the Clearances: it includes Lowland emigrants, earlier and later migrants, and people who left for work or opportunity as well as those forced from their homes. Highland migration created important Gaelic communities overseas without making all Scottish settlement a story of clearance refugees.

2. Causes: from clan chiefs to commercial landlords

The Clearances grew from a long transformation of Highland landholding. After Culloden in 1746, restrictions on arms and Highland dress and the abolition of heritable jurisdictions weakened the chiefs’ military and judicial powers. These changes accelerated a commercial reorientation already underway rather than instantly turning every chief into a different kind of landlord. The concept of dùthchas expressed customary belonging and obligations within clan territory; it was not a universal, enforceable individual right to permanent tenancy. Clanship itself contained hierarchy and unequal power, not an entirely egalitarian community destroyed overnight.

Onto this changed social order came the broader ideology of agricultural "Improvement" (the Lowland context of which Card #18 addresses), which held that land and people alike should be rationalised for maximum productivity — and that the "unimproved" were fit objects for either improvement or removal. The decisive economic driver, however, was sheep. From the 1760s–1790s the hardy Cheviot and Blackface breeds proved they could thrive on Highland ground, and rising wool and mutton prices — buoyed by a growing industrial population and by Napoleonic-era demand — made large sheep farms dramatically more profitable than tenant townships. A single shepherd and a flock could generate more rent than an entire community of small tenants. Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster brought 500 Cheviot ewes north around 1791; 1792 became Bliadhna nan Caorach, the "Year of the Sheep," marked by a short-lived tenant protest in Easter Ross.

3. Not only a Highland story: sheep came from the south

The historical geographer Robert Dodgshon, writing in the Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (2012), argues that clearance was a process that affected all of Scotland. In the Lowlands, multiple-tenant farms were cleared gradually over a century or more by "tenant reduction", which T. M. Devine has called "clearance by stealth". The Highlands remain where clearance was most sudden and most dramatic, but they were not unique.

Commercial sheep farming came to the Highlands from the south. By the 1680s some farms in the Southern Uplands already ran flocks of over 500 sheep, and some over 1,000, with about half of farms in single tenancy. In Galloway, landowners enclosed huge cattle parks for the English market; Sir David Dunbar's park at Baldoon (1682) covered over 1,800 acres. Enclosure of common grazings helped spark the Galloway "Levellers" of 1723–24, who pulled down park dykes — an early, Lowland episode of resistance to clearance.

The first Highland sheep clearances came in the 1750s in the southern Highlands, as a northward extension of this movement. Many of the pioneers were southern farmers. John Campbell, who in 1754 replaced four runrig tenants at Glenovoe in Dunbartonshire and was reputed to be the area's first large-scale sheep farmer, came from Annandale in Dumfriesshire. Not everyone expected it to last: in 1775 the agricultural writer Andrew Wight predicted that those who turned the Highlands over to sheep would, "very probably after doing mischief to themselves", go back to black cattle.

4. The kelp industry's complicating role

The kelp boom is the single fact that most disrupts a simple, uniform "continuous clearance" narrative. Kelp — burnt seaweed yielding alkali (soda ash) for soap and glass — became highly valuable from roughly the 1790s when the Napoleonic Wars cut off cheaper Spanish barilla and other Continental imports. The price rose from around £3 a ton in 1750 to a high of over £20 a ton by 1810. On many west-coast and island estates (Mull, the Uists, Harris), landlords in this period did the opposite of clearing: they retained and even packed in coastal populations, breaking up joint tenancies to create small crofts too small to live on by farming alone, precisely so that families would be forced to labour at the seasonal, back-breaking work of kelp harvesting. At its peak the industry employed roughly 10,000 families — an estimated 40,000 people in the north-west. Kelp thus delayed clearance in some places and created the overcrowded crofting fringe in others.

The reckoning came after 1815. With peace, tariffs on Continental imports were lifted and cheap alternatives flooded the market; as Historic Environment Scotland's Kevin Grant records, "even the highest grade of kelp had fallen back to £3 a ton by 1827" (the Liverpool price fell from about £9 a ton in 1823 to £3 13s 4d by 1828), and the industry was essentially worthless by the 1830s. Landlords who had bet their finances — and their swollen tenant populations — on kelp were suddenly ruined, and their now "surplus" coastal crofters became, in landlord eyes, a liability; an 1841 House of Commons select committee reckoned the crofting parishes carried a "surplus population" of 45,000 to 60,000. Incentives shifted decisively toward removing rather than retaining people, and the subsequent clearances of the 1820s–1850s were frequently more coercive and more explicitly aimed at emigration.

5. How the crofting township was made

Crofts were an old idea: small, consolidated holdings, often attached to mills or alehouses or given to ploughmen. What was new from the late eighteenth century was the crofting township, a planned cluster of crofts laid out in strips or blocks. Dodgshon traces three strands that came together by the 1790s. First, smallholdings, often called crofts from the start, were carved out of waste ground on the eastern edge of the Highlands, such as Millbuie on the Black Isle, sometimes by squatters who had been cleared further west. Second, some estates divided runrig townships into small farms; on the Argyll estate in Mull and Tiree, a policy of keeping about four tenants per township gave way, as population grew, to croft-sized holdings. Third, in the 1780s the British Fisheries Society laid out fishing villages at Ullapool and Tobermory around small crofts, whose holders were expected to combine fishing and farming.

The crofting township also had an intellectual pedigree. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson argues that Enlightenment improvers deliberately promoted small, spade-worked holdings to keep a large population of potential soldiers on the land. Examples include the Annexed Estates' "King's Cottagers" of 1763, Lord Kames's settlement of evicted Highlanders on Blair Drummond moss from 1766, and the kail-yard and cow's-grass allotments the British Fisheries Society gave its Ullapool settlers in 1788. In 1792 the naturalist John Walker praised Blair Drummond to the Highland Society for resettling nearly six hundred Gaels "forced to abandon the high parts of Perthshire . . . on account of sheep farming".

War prices from 1793 then pulled in two directions. Soaring wool prices encouraged landlords to clear townships with good grazing, while soaring kelp prices gave them a reason to pack people onto the coast. The potato and fishing let more people live on less land, and some estates began to distinguish full crofts from "half-crofts". Sutherland shows the result. Its interior straths were emptied and people resettled in coastal crofting villages such as Brora and Helmsdale. By 1870, 95 per cent of Sutherland's farms were under 20 acres, most of them on the coast, while the interior was held by 30–40 large sheep farms. On Skye, Lewis, Harris and the Uists, many townships were laid out in 1810–15, one of the most concentrated reorganisations of land anywhere in Scotland.

The arrangement was meant to be temporary. In 1810–11 the surveyor John Blackadder laid out crofts in Skye and North Uist at a size that "may answer for enclosures … should it be thought proper at any future period to let any of them to single tenants".

6. Phase 1 (c.1760s–1815): relocation, not simply expulsion

In the first phase, the intention of most estate owners was generally to retain and redeploy their tenants elsewhere on the estate — principally on the coast, to work fishing and kelp — rather than to expel them from the estate entirely. This is why planned coastal villages and crofting townships (Helmsdale, Bettyhill, and many others) were laid out. The historian's caution here is important: there was great variation, even within this phase, in intention, method and result. Some landlords tried to delay or soften removals at their own cost; a minority showed complete indifference. The evicted themselves often experienced even the "relocation" model as catastrophic — a demotion from farmer to landless labourer-fisherman on land that could not feed a family.

7. Two Highlands: the south before 1800, the north after

Dodgshon stresses the contrast between the southern Highlands, cleared mostly before 1800, and the north and north-west, cleared mostly after it. Southern townships were modest, usually four to six tenants plus subtenants and cottars, and their clearance was often softened. Some estates took only the hill or shieling ground for sheep and left the township's core; some early sheep farms were held jointly by several tenants; and many sheep farms in the southern and central Highlands kept a herd of about twenty cattle into the 1840s and 1850s.

In the north the townships were often larger and more crowded, and the sheep farms created from them were far bigger. Several thousand people were cleared from the interior straths of Sutherland in 1814–16, including Strathnaver, and 3,331 from townships in Kildonan, Lairg and Rogart in 1819. Sheep holdings grouped many former townships together: Donald and William Mackay built up over 150,000 acres from a base at Melness, Greig of Tulloch was said to have "100 square miles under sheep", and the Cameron of Corrychoillie holdings clipped 37,000 sheep a year. Where a Lowland single-tenant farm still employed many people, a whole Highland township could now be replaced by one shepherd and his family. That stark contrast, Dodgshon argues, is why the northern clearances came to define the whole process in public memory.

Dodgshon also adds context to Strathnaver. Patrick Sellar was both the estate's rent-collecting agent and the man who had successfully bid for the new sheep farm, so he issued the evictions from which he himself benefited. He staggered removal dates according to people's circumstances, but this caused confusion, and the estate also excluded tenants it considered troublesome from the new coastal lots. Newspaper readers took reports of houses being pulled down as proof of brutality, although tenants in the region normally removed their own roof timbers and doors when they left a holding. What made Strathnaver notorious was the combination of a death, a trial of a duke's agent, and the starkest form of clearance: busy townships replaced by a single sheep farm held by the man who cleared them.

8. The Sutherland Clearances and Patrick Sellar, examined

The Sutherland estate, centred on Dunrobin Castle, produced some of the largest and most notorious clearances. Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, and her wealthy husband the Marquess of Stafford (created 1st Duke of Sutherland in 1833), with commissioner James Loch and factors William Young and Patrick Sellar, reorganised inland townships into large sheep farms between roughly 1807 and 1821. Many families were relocated to coastal crofts intended to support fishing and other work. A frequently repeated estimate is about 15,000 people, but estimates differ by phase and by what is being counted; no precise total should be treated as an agreed census of those evicted. The estate presented the scheme as improvement. That stated intention does not cancel the loss of livelihood, insecure provision or coercion experienced by tenants.

Strathnaver, especially the removals of 1814 and 1819, became emblematic. Houses were burned to prevent reoccupation. The indictment and witness testimony in Sellar’s 1816 trial described the treatment of the elderly Margaret MacKay during the clearance of William Chisholm’s household in June 1814, and her subsequent death. The precise circumstances and Sellar’s responsibility were contested at trial; the account of a bedridden woman removed from a burning house should be identified as testimony, not converted into an uncontested judicial finding. Sellar also had a direct economic interest in the sheep farm created by the removals.

Sellar was tried at Inverness in April 1816 on charges including culpable homicide, real injury and oppression, and was acquitted. That verdict is a legal fact. The case remains a focus of historical argument over evidence, the conduct of estate management and the assumptions of a property-owning establishment. Historians differ in their assessment of Sellar, but an acquittal is neither proof that every allegation was true nor a blanket moral vindication of the clearance programme.

A note on the Gaelic phrase: Bliadhna an Losgaidh ("the Year of the Burnings") is most reliably associated by historian James Hunter with 1819, the year of the largest and most systematic burnings, when the estate cleared over 1,000 families. The popular author John Prebble attached the phrase to 1814; this appears to be an error widely copied since. The 1814 events are real and terrible; the label belongs to 1819. Much of what posterity knows comes from Donald MacLeod, a stonemason from the Strathnaver township of Rosal, whose letters and book Gloomy Memories gave an eyewitness account; Rosal's excavated ruins are today a preserved site.

9. Other documented clearance events: Glencalvie (1845) and Knoydart (1853)

Glencalvie, Strathcarron, Ross-shire (May 1845) is one of the best-documented clearances precisely because a correspondent of The Times of London witnessed it. Factor James Gillanders, acting for the absentee Major Charles Robertson of Kindeace, evicted 18 families — reported as 92 individuals — to make way for a sheep farm; unlike the Sutherland tenants, they were offered no new crofts. Unable to find shelter, around 80 people camped under tarpaulins in the churchyard at Croick. The Times report (published 2 June 1845, from an unnamed correspondent) brought this clearance to a wide readership; it described "a most wretched spectacle to see these poor people march out of the glen in a body, with two or three carts filled with children." Messages scratched on the church's east window — including the haunting "Glencalvie people the wicked generation" — survive, though their exact authorship and date are uncertain (they are in English copperplate, while the reporter recorded that the refugees spoke only Gaelic, and some reference later dates such as 1854 and 1869).

Knoydart (1853) shows the post-famine pattern. After the death of the debt-laden 16th chief in 1852, his widow Josephine MacDonell (née Bennett), acting during her son's minority, issued summonses of removal across the estate. Around 330 people (local accounts give 332–333) boarded the Sillery at Isleornsay for Canada; those who resisted or returned found their homes pulled down and were left as destitute squatters, their plight recorded in a protest pamphlet by the activist-lawyer Donald Ross. Knoydart's later history closed a circle: the community bought out its estate in 1999.

10. Legal mechanisms and enforcement

Clearance operated through ordinary property law. Landlords obtained removal actions ("summonses of removing") through the Sheriff Courts, and the summonses were served by a sheriff's officer. Because tenants had no security of tenure — the customary dùthchas had no standing in Scots law — a landlord could legally remove them at the term day. Where tenants refused to go, enforcement could turn violent: the burning of house timbers and roofs to prevent re-occupation (documented in Strathnaver), and, in the confrontations at Greenyards/Strathcarron in 1854, police baton charges that seriously injured women who had massed to intercept the officer. Resistance more often took the form of intercepting and destroying the summonses — a recurring feature from Culrain (1820) to the Skye agitations of the 1880s.

11. Human cost and scale

There is no securely agreed total for everyone displaced across the Highlands and Islands over the whole Clearance period. Contemporary records are incomplete, geographical boundaries vary, and a family moved to the coast may later appear again in an emigration count. Popular totals cannot be added together without checking these definitions. Sutherland alone involved thousands of people, with about 15,000 frequently quoted for the wider programme; lower figures sometimes refer to different phases or populations. Regional census decline is important evidence of demographic upheaval, but it is not a direct tally of evictions.

T. M. Devine, in To the Ends of the Earth (2011), describes a population decline averaging about a third between 1841 and 1861 in the west-coast region north of Ardnamurchan and the Inner and Outer Hebrides, mainly through emigration: Uig in Lewis lost almost half its people, Jura and Barra about a third, and several Skye parishes a quarter or more. He calls it the greatest concentration of out-migration in the modern history of Scottish Gaeldom. This is a regional finding, not a figure for all Highland Scotland. In the famine-era western Highlands, overseas emigration accounted for a large share of permanent departures; earlier removals had more often relocated families within an estate. Landlord-assisted passages and self-financed migration coexisted, and neither category by itself establishes whether departure was freely chosen.

12. The Highland Potato Famine (1846–c.1856)

The potato blight (Phytophthora infestans) that devastated Ireland struck the western Highlands and Hebrides from 1846. It was part of the same pan-European crisis but far less lethal than Ireland's: the population at serious risk was never more than about 200,000, and prompt (if grudging and moralising) charitable relief from the rest of Britain — plus the Free Church's early alarm — kept mass starvation deaths comparatively low. But the terms of relief bred destitution, and government and landlords increasingly concluded that permanent "reduction of the population" by emigration was the only solution. The Highland and Island Emigration Society, which grew out of a small Skye scheme of Sheriff Substitute Thomas Fraser and was then run by Sir Charles Trevelyan and Sir John McNeill from 1852, assisted precisely 4,919 men, women and children to Australia between 1852 and 1857 (per National Records of Scotland ref HD4/5); ScotlandsPeople records 2,569 emigrants from Skye on twelve ships in 1852; this single-year figure is distinct from the Society’s total across 1852–1857. The famine did not begin Highland emigration; it enormously accelerated a process already long underway.

T. M. Devine, in To the Ends of the Earth (2011), explains why the Highlands escaped an Irish-scale catastrophe. Early estimates put the potato failure at over 75 per cent of crofting parishes, and in the Ross of Mull winter mortality reached three times the normal rate, but by the summer of 1847 death rates were back to normal and by 1848 fewer than 70,000 people still needed relief. The Free Church acted first, sending meal in its schooner Breadalbane and arranging for over 3,000 able-bodied men to work on the Lowland railways. From February 1847 the Central Board of Management for Highland Relief raised nearly £210,000, probably the largest sum given to any single charitable cause in nineteenth-century Scotland. Many landowners, a large share of them recent buyers with fortunes from commerce, also spent heavily: Sir James Matheson put over £107,000 into Lewis in 1845–50. Above all, a booming Lowland economy, at the height of the railway-building mania, absorbed tens of thousands of seasonal migrants.

13. From relief to removal, 1848–1856

Devine argues that the turn to mass eviction after 1848 had specific causes. Relief was made deliberately harsh. Influenced by Sir Charles Trevelyan, the Treasury official who also directed Irish famine relief, the Central Board imposed a "destitution test" from 1848: a full day's work, in Trevelyan's words "at least eight hours", for a pound of meal, issued only fortnightly and policed by retired naval officers. Free Church ministers called it "systematized starvation". In Lowland newspapers such as The Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald, and in the views of officials like Trevelyan, the famine was blamed on the supposed racial inferiority and idleness of the Celtic Gael.

Money also mattered. The Central Board announced it would end its work in 1850, poor-law rolls began to rise, and landlords feared that a new law giving the able-bodied a right to relief would bankrupt them. Between 1846 and 1852 the price of black cattle, the crofters' main source of cash, fell by more than half, while sheep prices rose from the later 1840s until the early 1860s. Several estates were insolvent and run by trustees, usually Edinburgh lawyers or accountants whose legal duty was to the creditors; Devine notes that some of the harshest evictions of these years, including those in North Uist and Knoydart, took place on estates under trust.

The evidence of coercion is detailed. At Tobermory Sheriff Court, over 81 per cent of the writs of removal granted between 1846 and 1852 were issued in 1848–52. Sir James Matheson obtained 1,367 summonses against his Lewis tenants between 1848 and 1851. His chamberlain, John Munro Mackenzie, picked about 2,500 people for emigration; of the first 1,512 selected, only 45 were willing to go, but by 1855 he had almost reached his target through threats of eviction, seizure of cattle and the withdrawal of famine relief. In spring 1851 the Duke of Argyll told his chamberlain that the object was to send out those the estate would otherwise have to feed. Estate managers on Ardnamurchan, Lewis, Tiree and Mull recorded character as well as arrears: tenants were marked for removal for "intemperate habits" or living with a woman not their wife. The government official Sir Edward Pine Coffin warned that landlords were seeking "the extermination of the population".

Sir John McNeill's report of 1851 to the Board of Supervision rejected further charity and recommended large-scale emigration of the "surplus" population. It led to the Emigration Advances Act, and McNeill and Trevelyan then ran the Highland and Island Emigration Society. Trevelyan proposed removing 30,000 to 40,000 people from the western Highlands and Islands and welcomed the prospect of German settlers in their place. Devine counts over 10,000 emigrants assisted from four great estates, those of the Dukes of Argyll and Sutherland, John Gordon of Cluny and Matheson, plus about 5,000 sent to Australia by the Society. He adds that in the later twentieth century such a strategy might have been called ethnic cleansing. That is his interpretation: Marjory Harper and others stress that many Highlanders also chose to leave, and that motives were mixed even in these years.

14. Assisted emigration: landlords, the Society and the state

The historian Marjory Harper, in Adventurers and Exiles (2003), traces how official attitudes reversed. Until about 1800 landlords, especially on kelping estates, opposed emigration, and their Highland Society promoted the Passenger Vessels Act of 1803 to make it dearer. After 1815, with kelp, cattle and distilling in collapse, the same class came to see emigration as the remedy for poverty and arrears. The government stayed reluctant to pay. Highland petitioners in the 1820s, such as forty-four small farmers from Duirinish in Skye whose farms had been "converted into sheep walks", got little help, and landlords began to fund emigration themselves. Between 1837 and 1840 about 5,200 Scots, most of them Highlanders, went to New South Wales on bounty passages paid from Australian land sales; when the agent Dr David Boyter reached Fort William in May 1838, the Inverness Courier reported that over 1,200 signed up.

The famine decade made landlord-funded emigration a mass movement. Drawing on T. M. Devine's research, Harper gives about 14,000 emigrants assisted by Highland landlords between 1815 and 1856, almost 11,000 of them in 1846–56. John Gordon of Cluny sent 3,200 tenants from South Uist and Barra to Canada; 2,337 were sent from Lewis; a third of the population left the Duke of Argyll's island of Tiree. The Emigration Advances Act of 1851, the government's only legislative concession to the famine, let landlords borrow on favourable terms to fund emigration. The Highland and Island Emigration Society, which Devine has called "a government project in all but name", then sent whole families to Australia to replace pastoral workers lost to the gold fields: landlords paid about a third of the cost, the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission relaxed its eligibility rules, and the Society paid for outfit and travel to the port, expecting emigrants to repay it later.

Provision varied sharply. Canada's chief emigration agent, Alexander Buchanan, condemned landlords who landed destitute, mostly Gaelic-speaking tenants at Quebec and left his department to pay their onward travel. He singled out Gordon of Cluny, who in 1851 shipped 1,681 people from Barra, South Uist and Benbecula, and contrasted him with Sir James Matheson, who paid for 986 Lewis tenants to travel all the way to the Eastern Townships. Matheson's scheme was nonetheless coerced: only 17 per cent of those he selected in 1851 were willing to go, and 1,180 summonses of removal were issued on Lewis between 1849 and 1851. Devine's figures, in To the Ends of the Earth (2011), are starker: 1,367 summonses in 1848–51, and only 45 willing among the first 1,512 people selected. The two sets of figures cover different periods and stages of selection and are not directly comparable. Barra emigrants landed at Quebec in 1851 swore that people who had fled to the hills at Lochboisdale were hunted down by a policeman, the ground officer and constables, and that at least four families were divided.

Was this emigration chosen or forced? Contemporary witnesses disagreed. Officials told the 1841 and 1844 inquiries of an "anxious desire" to emigrate, while ministers in Skye, Mull and the Small Isles reported reluctance. Harper accepts that by the 1840s and 1850s clearance and emigration had come to be seen, in Canada and Australia alike, as "two sides of the same coin", yet she also argues that Highland emigrants were varied in background and motive and that many paid their own way. Historians who emphasise coercion, such as Eric Richards, James Hunter and Devine, read the famine-era record more severely. The argument returned in 1884, when the Napier Commission, persuaded by estate claims of overpopulation, recommended state-aided emigration; the crofter colonies at Killarney and Saltcoats in Canada followed in 1888–89 and struggled from the start.

15. The second phase: from accommodation to rent maximisation

After 1815 kelp, cattle and grain prices all fell, harvests failed and the potato first showed its vulnerability in 1816–17. Wool recovered; the crofter's income did not. The historian Allan Macinnes sees this as the turning point between two phases of clearance. Before the 1820s many landlords still tried to keep their small tenants on the estate. Afterwards, the crowded coastal township that had once been the planned solution came to be seen as a burden, and policy moved to maximising rent. Many Highland estates were sold in the first half of the nineteenth century to new owners from commerce, banking and industry who had no traditional ties to their tenants.

Provision for the cleared shrank accordingly. Sutherland still offered coastal lots, but elsewhere, especially in the Hebrides, there was often little or none. Those cleared from Rum in 1826–27, and from South Uist and Barra in the removals that culminated in 1851, were offered only a free passage to North America. Dodgshon draws a clear line between this coercion and the earlier emigrations of the 1740s and 1770s, when whole townships had left by choice, led by their tacksmen.

Even crofting townships were cleared in the 1840s and 1850s. On Ulva, crofters described in an 1825 sale notice as making "a very handsome profit" from kelp were being cleared for sheep by the island's new owner by the late 1840s. Later in the century deer forests took further land, emptying crofting townships in the Park district of Lewis as well as sheep farms such as Rum.

Townships that survived grew more crowded. At Balemore in North Uist, 18 crofts laid out in 1814 became 35; at Upper Carloway in Lewis, 19 became 45, many of them taken by people cleared from sheep districts. Common grazings were cut away for sheep farms and deer forests. The eleven townships in the parish of Knock in Lewis held 173 cottars between them. It was the removal of the Braes crofters' hill grazings on Skye in 1865, without any cut in rent, that led to their rent strike in 1882 and the Battle of the Braes.

16. The Scottish diaspora: destinations and communities

The Highlands supplied a disproportionate share of Scottish emigrants only for part of the period. T. M. Devine shows that in the later eighteenth century, and probably until the 1850s, the Highlands had the highest emigration rate per head in Scotland. After about 1860, however, Lowland emigrants outnumbered Highland ones by roughly seventeen to one until the First World War. In 1851 first-generation Highlanders were rarely more than 10 per cent of any Lowland town's population. Devine concludes that the clearances cannot explain mass Scottish emigration after about 1860, even though they were central between the 1760s and the potato famine.

Marjory Harper's figures put the Highland exodus in national context. Official returns record 1,841,534 Scottish emigrants to destinations outside Europe between 1825 and 1914: 44 per cent to the United States, 28 per cent to Canada and 25 per cent to Australasia. Scots favoured Canada until 1847. The loss of almost 2 million people in the nineteenth century equalled 42 per cent of Scotland's 1911 population, against less than 25 per cent for England and Wales. For the eighteenth century she cites about 75,000 emigrants in 1700–80, only 15,000 of them Highlanders, but notes that in 1773–76 the Highlands and Islands supplied 18 per cent of all British emigrants. She also stresses that most eighteenth-century Highland emigrants were middle-ranking tenants who paid their own way, often against their landlords' wishes, and that tacksmen organised many departures.

Highland emigration created some of the most durable Gaelic communities outside Scotland: - Nova Scotia, especially Cape Breton Island, became a Gaelic heartland; the ship Hector reached Pictou in 1773, and large nineteenth-century migration made Gaelic a major community language in Cape Breton. Canadian Gaelic survives there today, celebrated at the Highland Village Museum (Baile nan Gàidheal) at Iona. - Glengarry County, Ontario, founded 1784 by Gaelic-speaking settlers from Lochaber and later reinforced by Knoydart emigrants, remained a magnet for Highland immigration for decades. - The Red River Colony / Selkirk Settlement (Manitoba) was established from 1811–1812 by Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk, a documented promoter of assisted emigration who used his fortune to found colonies (Prince Edward Island, Baldoon in Upper Canada, and Red River) partly out of genuine humanitarian concern for displaced crofters. A group evicted from Kildonan in Sutherland sailed in 1813 and, after a brutal first winter on Hudson Bay, helped found what became Winnipeg. - Australia and New Zealand received later flows. The Highland and Island Emigration Society assisted almost 5,000 people to Australia (1852–1857). Highland settlement in New Zealand was smaller and later than the romantic image suggests — most Scottish settlers of Otago/Dunedin (from 1848) were Lowlanders, and true Clearance refugees were a minority — but distinct Gaelic streams exist, most famously the Waipu settlers who reached New Zealand's North Island in 1853 via Nova Scotia and Australia under the Rev. Norman McLeod.

The cultural legacy is large and living: clan societies, Highland Games, Burns suppers, pipe bands and Gaelic preservation efforts flourish across the diaspora, and clan-clustered settlement (Camerons in Glengarry, MacLeods in Cape Breton, MacDonalds in PEI) kept Highland identity meaningful for generations. Highland emigrants also fed Lowland industrial labour markets — a connection Card #20 develops — as displaced families moved to Glasgow and the industrialising central belt.

Memory and evidence diverge. Devine notes in To the Ends of the Earth (2011) that much of the diaspora still believes its ancestors were driven out after Culloden and by the Clearances, a belief shaped above all by John Prebble's Culloden (1961) and The Highland Clearances (1963), which remain the most widely read Scottish history among Scottish-Americans. Popular culture reinforced the idea of emigration as tragedy: the "Canadian Boat Song", first published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1829 and still the best-known lament of Highland Canada, was written by a non-Gael who had never emigrated. Devine's own conclusion is double-edged. The Clearances cannot explain most Scottish emigration, which after 1860 was overwhelmingly Lowland and voluntary, but in the famine years, as he documents in detail, emigration from the Hebrides was often coerced.

These migrations also took place within British colonial expansion. At Red River, Selkirk’s settlement entered an existing Indigenous and Métis world, entangled with fur-trade rivalry and conflict. Highland families could experience dispossession in Scotland while becoming settlers on lands already inhabited overseas. Remembering their hardship should not erase the peoples whose land and political autonomy colonial settlement threatened. Devine gives a stark Australian example: Major Donald Macleod, a Skye tacksman, acquired over 20,000 acres for sheep after a series of bloody fights with Aboriginal people that ended in the near-destruction of the local tribes, which Devine calls a more draconian clearance than any in the homeland, carried out by Gaels.

17. Gaelic language decline

The Clearances accelerated a decline with multiple causes. Around 1700 perhaps a quarter to 30% of Scotland's population spoke Gaelic; the Gaelic parishes held about 23% of Scots in the 1760s and 18.5% in 1806, by Charles Withers's estimates. The 1881 census — the first to count Gaelic speakers — recorded 231,594 speakers, 6.2% of Scotland's population of 3,735,573. Depopulation of the Gaelic-speaking heartland by clearance, famine and emigration removed the language's demographic base, while the marginalisation of Gaelic in English-dominated schooling following the Education (Scotland) Act 1872 dealt a further heavy blow. In pockets, isolation preserved distinct dialects — East Sutherland Gaelic survived among coastal fisherfolk descended from cleared interior families for roughly half a century longer than surrounding communities.

The 1872 Act did not contain an explicit ban on Gaelic. The damage came through a school system organised chiefly around English, through prejudice against Gaelic and through the limited place allowed to the language in teaching. Nor did Gaelic vanish: it survived in Scotland and overseas, and contemporary Gaelic education and cultural work build on that continuity. Earlier estimates of the share of Scots speaking Gaelic are reconstructions, not comparable national censuses.

18. Historiographical debate — and the forward gesture to 1886

How to characterise "the Clearances" is one of the most contested questions in Scottish history. The older tradition (and popular memory, shaped by John Prebble's best-selling 1963 account) frames them as a near-genocidal betrayal. A "revisionist" strand — most provocatively Michael Fry's Wild Scots (2005) — argues the evictions were exaggerated, notes that regional population actually rose across much of the period, and stresses genuine economic and subsistence pressures. Between these poles sits the current scholarly mainstream. T.M. Devine rejects both romantic oversimplification and economic-determinist minimisation: he insists the demographic evidence (a Highland population that roughly doubled in key areas between the 1750s and 1841, driven partly by the calorie-rich potato) created real subsistence pressure — but he is emphatic that "we cannot explain the catastrophic haemorrhage of population… except by suggesting that either indirect or direct compulsion was used," and his account of Sellar's "terror" is unsparing. James Hunter (The Making of the Crofting Community, 1976) brought the crofters' own perspective and oral tradition to the centre and read the process as class conflict; Eric Richards produced the definitive, deliberately balanced study of Sellar and of the Clearances as a whole. The consensus that emerges: the Clearances were neither a single coordinated plan nor a benign modernisation, but an uneven, regionally varied, economically driven upheaval that in numerous documented cases involved real coercion and cruelty.

The story did not end in dispossession. Sustained agitation — the Crofters' War, rent strikes and land raids, the 1882 Battle of the Braes on Skye — forced Gladstone's government to appoint the Napier Commission (1883), which toured the Highlands hearing crofter testimony in Gaelic (its first witness, Angus Stewart of Braes, testified on 8 May 1883). Its report, and the election of crofter MPs, produced the Crofters Holdings (Scotland) Act 1886, granting eligible crofters security of tenure, fair-rent adjudication and compensation for improvements — a decisive break, though not a universal prohibition on eviction. (This political resolution belongs chiefly to a later chapter; it is noted here only as the endpoint of the Clearance era.)

The 1886 Act chiefly protected qualifying crofters in seven Highland counties and created machinery for fair rents and compensation for improvements. It did not restore all cleared land, automatically give land to landless cottars or resolve wider questions of ownership. Describing it as the final solution to the land question exaggerates its reach. Later land legislation, land raids and community buyouts show both its importance and its limits.