Improvement: The Ideology of Progress

1. Scope and evidence

The core claims of this card are Established in peer-reviewed Scottish agricultural and social history. That "improvement" was a coherent, Enlightenment-rooted ideology as well as a set of farming techniques is well documented (T.M. Devine, Neil Davidson, Brian Bonnyman). That it delivered real Lowland productivity gains is uncontested. The one claim requiring precise, careful treatment is the link between improvement ideology and the Highland Clearances. The established position is that improvement provided genuine and significant ideological legitimation for clearance — but that it worked alongside, not instead of, powerful economic drivers. This card explicitly does not claim improvement ideology was the sole or primary cause of the Clearances; the detailed economic narrative is covered on a separate History-series card.

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2. Sir John Sinclair and the institutional promotion of improvement

If improvement had a national impresario, it was Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster (1754–1835). A Caithness landowner of the family of the Earls of Caithness, born at Thurso Castle and educated in law at Edinburgh, Glasgow and Oxford, Sinclair inherited his estates in 1770 and sat in Parliament, chiefly for Caithness, from 1780. Contemporaries nicknamed him "Agricultural Sir John."

His two great institutional monuments were the Statistical Account of Scotland and the Board of Agriculture. In May 1790 he wrote to every Church of Scotland minister in each of Scotland's 938 parishes, circulating a list of 160 questions (with a six-part addendum, and five more added in a January 1791 circular) designed to elucidate, in his words, "the Natural History and Political State of Scotland." The resulting Statistical Account (21 volumes, 1791–99) is one of the finest contemporary records of any European country on the eve of the industrial age. (The Statistical Account is treated in depth as an institution elsewhere in this collection; here it matters as an instrument of the improving mind — a systematic audit of a nation undertaken so that it might be made more productive and happy.) Sinclair explicitly said his object was to ascertain "the quantum of happiness enjoyed by [a country's] inhabitants, and the means of its future improvement."

Sinclair is also the man who introduced the word "statistics" into English. He borrowed it from the German Statistik he had encountered on a European tour in 1786, deliberately choosing a "new word" because he thought it "might attract more public attention." This claim is well founded: while the German term predated him (Gottfried Achenwall, 1749) and E.A.W. Zimmermann had used an English form in 1787, Sinclair is universally credited with naturalising "statistics" in English through the Statistical Account.

In 1793 he persuaded Pitt's government to establish the Board of Agriculture — strictly, the Board or Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture and Internal Improvement — a semi-official, grant-aided private society (with an annual grant of £3,000) of which Sinclair was founding president and the English improver Arthur Young secretary. The Board commissioned the General View county surveys, a systematic survey of British farming, and was, in the words of one reference work, "generally a proponent of enclosures." Sinclair topped off this "pyramid of agricultural enquiries" with his General Report… of Scotland (1814) and his one-volume Code of Agriculture (1817). His improving projects were famously prolific and often financially disastrous — the Board itself lost its funding and was dissolved in 1822 — and even sympathetic contemporaries found something faintly comic in his relentless projecting.

3. The "Improvement" ideology explained

"Improvement" was not a single doctrine but a pervasive ethos, and its power lay in fusing the practical with the moral. At bottom it was a shift in humankind's relationship to the natural and social world: nature was no longer to be accepted "as given or preordained" but "could and should be altered for the better or 'Improved' by systematic intervention," as Devine puts it — and the same logic was extended to fields, estates, villages and people. Improvement, Devine writes, "became not simply a matter of vital material concern but an intellectual movement which soon attracted a veritable army of theorists, propagandists and commentators."

Three features define it. First, it was applied and institutional rather than purely philosophical. It expressed itself in agricultural societies — the Honourable Society of Improvers, founded in Edinburgh on 8 June 1723 with around 300 members from the aristocracy, landed gentry and legal profession, was the first of its kind in Europe, established eight years before the Dublin Society and thirty-one before its London equivalent — as well as in a torrent of improvement literature and county surveys, in model farms, planned villages, and improving clauses written into leases. Second, it was socially confident and hierarchical: it assumed that a rational, educated landed and professional elite could and should reorganise the lives of those below them for their own good. The new class of estate factors — often university-trained lawyers who had sat in the lecture rooms of Smith, Ferguson and Millar — were its practical agents. Third, its remit was total: it embraced not only crop rotations and drainage but "manners" and morals, the "improvement of the people" as much as of the soil.

This is where improvement connects to, but is distinct from, the Four Stages theory covered on Card #9 and the debate over commercial society on Card #16. The stadial theorists supplied the underlying map — the developmental hierarchy running from hunting through pastoral and agricultural to commercial society, with the "ruder" stages ranked as primitive and the commercial stage as the pinnacle. Improvement was the practical programme that took that map to the ground: it aimed to move land and people up the ladder. Sinclair himself made the link explicit. When he distilled the Statistical Account, he arranged selected parish reports into a deliberately progressive sequence — a wholly pastoral district (Kingussie in Badenoch), an agricultural one (Morham in East Lothian), one with early manufactures (Moulin in Perthshire), one fully industrialised (Neilston in Renfrewshire), a commercial town (Montrose), and finally Edinburgh "as a specimen of the progress of luxury" — believing, as the editor Richard Sher observes, that Scotland's parishes could at a single moment "replicate the entire history of human societies." The abstract theory and the improving programme were, in Sinclair's hands, two faces of the same optimism.

4. Genuine agricultural achievements

It would be a serious distortion — and a breach of this site's "accuracy over patriotism" standard — to treat improvement only as ideological cover. In much of Scotland, and especially the Lowlands, it delivered real and lasting agricultural gains.

Before improvement, most Lowland farming used the communal runrig system on the fermtoun, with scattered unfenced strips reallocated among tenant families, low yields and periodic dearth. From the mid-eighteenth century, landlords enclosed and consolidated holdings, introduced the Norfolk-style turnip and sown-grass rotations that let livestock be over-wintered and manure recycled, limed and under-drained previously unworkable land, and let farms on longer leases with improving clauses to single tenants who could invest. James Smith's sub-soil ploughing and drainage brought low-lying carselands into arable production.

The results were structural, not cosmetic. Standard reference and scholarly accounts describe a dramatic increase in crop yields, with Scottish output catching up on English levels within a few decades and, on many estates, roughly doubling arable output between about 1750 and 1820. Estate records cited in the literature show oat yields rising from around 10–12 bolls per acre to 20–25 bolls by 1800; potato cultivation expanded enormously. Crucially, in the Lowlands this transformation happened without a mass-displacement equivalent of the Highland Clearances — many sitting tenants adapted to the new demands, though the Lowlands did see their own quieter, longer dispossession of the cottar class, as Devine has emphasised. The point is not that Lowland improvement was painless, but that it was primarily a genuine productivity revolution, whereas in the Highlands the same ideology took a far more coercive turn.

5. The critical intellectual connection to the Highland Clearances

Here precision is everything. The Highland Clearances had powerful, independent economic drivers — landlord debt and bankruptcy, the wartime boom and post-1815 collapse of the kelp and black-cattle economies, spiralling population pressure culminating in the potato famine of 1846–48 — and those drivers are narrated in detail on a separate History-series card. This Ideas card makes a narrower, sharper claim: that improvement ideology supplied the legitimating framework that made clearance feel not merely expedient but righteous to those who carried it out.

Devine states the balance directly. "Material factors alone did not drive landlord strategies," he writes in The Scottish Clearances (2018); "the power of ideas was also decisive, especially those derived from the Scottish and European Enlightenments on the optimistic possibilities for progress in both the human and natural spheres." Improvement, in other words, was not a mask cynically donned but a genuine belief system through which landlords and their agents understood what they were doing.

That belief system worked in three connected ways. First, it recoded traditional Highland society as backward. Runrig townships, communal bailtean, subsistence pastoralism and clanship were re-described in the language of the stadial hierarchy as primitive, indolent, unproductive — a "ruder" stage awaiting elevation. The Reverend John Walker could write that "unassisted exertions of industry are not to be expected from a people still in the pastoral stage of society; nor from unenlightened minds are we anywhere to expect the sudden discontinuance of bad customs." Second, it reframed removal as improvement of the people themselves. The purest expression is James Loch's Account of the Improvements on the Estates of the Marquess of Stafford (1820), which described the Sutherland interior as "unfit for the habitation of man," presented eviction as the "improvement of a people," and predicted that "in a few years the character of the whole of this population will be completely changed." Clearance became, in this rhetoric, a form of emancipation from degradation. Third, it licensed coercion in the name of long-term benefit — the conviction, prominent in estate papers, that everyone would benefit in the end.

Recent scholarship (Martin MacGregor and others) has organised the whole era 1746–1886 around successive external ideologies, of which "Improvement," under "the ultimate influence of the Scottish Enlightenment," dominated the first phase to 1815. The essential nuance is that improvement did not replace profit as a motive — Devine is clear that impersonal market forces and the search for financial stability drove investment in sheep-walks — but that it made the resulting displacement intelligible and defensible to its perpetrators as progress. It is this that distinguishes an ideological factor from a merely economic one: it changed not what was profitable but what was thinkable and sayable.

Sinclair's own record illustrates the ambiguity precisely. He was primarily a national, literary and institutional promoter of improvement rather than a byword for eviction like Sellar. Yet the ideology had teeth even in his hands: he introduced the Cheviot to the far north, and on his own Langwell/Berriedale estate tenants were removed to make way for sheep, resettled on the harsh coast at Badbea, between 1793 and 1802 — even as he reportedly regarded himself as humane and offered some assisted passage. Contemporaries and historians note that his own "improvements soon turned to evictions." He is thus not the arch-clearer but something more revealing: the respectable, benevolent face of an ideology whose logic, applied to the Highlands, produced dispossession.

6. Rival ecologies: the spade, the town and the sheep

Improvement in the Highlands was never one programme. In Enlightenment's Frontier (2013), the historian Fredrik Albritton Jonsson reconstructs a long quarrel between rival visions. One camp, rooted in the Select Society of the 1750s, worried that commercial farming would empty the countryside of the hardy people who filled Highland regiments. Lord Monboddo told the society that "the plough was the most destructive instrument to mankind that ever was invented". The minister Robert Wallace argued for small, equal holdings. After 1763 the Board for the Annexed Estates, whose members included Lord Kames, settled discharged soldiers as "King's Cottagers" on spade-worked plots of half an acre to three acres. The naturalist John Walker, sent to survey the Hebrides in 1764, praised the cas-chrom and the potato for letting large families live on very little land.

The opposing camp was led by the economist James Anderson. He wanted Merino sheep, larch plantations and free fishing towns that would break the power of the lairds as medieval towns had broken feudalism. His ideas shaped the British Fisheries Society of 1786, but the society's directors ended up giving settlers kail-yards and cow's grass instead. A third, liberal view came from Adam Smith and later Malthus and Lord Selkirk. Smith treated the Highlands mainly as a case of poverty. Malthus called the region "probably more redundant in population than any other part of Great Britain". Selkirk defended emigration as a "salutary drain" and settled about 800 Highlanders on Prince Edward Island in 1803. Jonsson argues that when the paternalist schemes failed after 1815, landlords turned to this liberal pessimism to justify clearance and assisted emigration.

Jonsson also finds here some early environmental anxieties. They include fears of climate deterioration in the Statistical Account, John Williams's 1789 warning that Britain's coal could run out, Sinclair's attempts to calculate how much wasteland was left to feed a growing population, and early talk of the "extirpation" of the Gaels by sheep (George Dempster, 1784). His argument that crofting itself grew out of these debates is a distinctive interpretation. It sits alongside, rather than replacing, accounts that stress the economic pressures of kelp, fishing and sheep.

7. Legacy and modern resonance

Improvement's constructive legacy is the modern Scottish agricultural landscape itself — the enclosed fields, planned villages (Sinclair's grid-planned Thurso among them) and productive farms that the movement built. Its darker legacy is as a paradigm case, now widely studied, of how an optimistic, self-consciously rational ideology of "progress" can authorise the overriding of a community's own wishes.

A number of scholars have drawn a cautious conceptual line between eighteenth-century "improvement" and later ideas of "development." Historians of empire (e.g. David Arnold on the "doctrine of improvement" behind the 1793 Permanent Settlement in Bengal) and of the Highlands (Fredrik Albritton Jonsson on Highland "improving discourses" and "agrarian patriotism") have noted strong family resemblances between improvement rhetoric and the later civilising-mission and development discourses that framed "backward" peoples as objects of benevolent, expert-led transformation. This is a genuine and illuminating parallel, and some historians treat improvement as a "pre-history of development." It should, however, be offered as a resonance rather than a demonstrated direct lineage: the analogy is suggestive, and the burden of proof for any strong genealogical claim remains with those who assert it.

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