Understanding Sources about the Highland Clearances

Who were the various players in these historical events and how can we interpret their voices and agenda in the documentary record?

On Friday the 21st of November 2025, Dr Martin Macgregor of the University of Glasgow will deliver a talk entitled ‘“Ach thèid an crann a thoirt dhen fharadh”: Celebrating Thirty Years of Tuath is Tighearna (‘Tenants and Landlords’), 1995-2025’. This talk commemorates the publication of the first volume of Gaelic texts (in poetic form), edited and translated expertly by Prof. Donald Meek, that allow the native witnesses to their own dispossession to be heard and understood. Thirty years is not very long in historical terms: this should remind us of the fact that the history of the Gaels of Scotland – whether in the Highlands or elsewhere – has generally been written using anglophone perspectives and voices, rather than their own.

(Prof Donald Meek and one of his star pupils.)

The Highland Clearances continue to be one of the most contested episodes in Scottish history and there is a large number of potential contemporary sources authored by various people for various audiences that can be brought into this debate.

When we look at debates surrounding Clearances and emigration it helps to delineate the identity of each set of people involved in these events and sources, what their general aims tended to be, and how much power and influence they actually had and what kind. As you read through sources about the Clearances, try to recognize each of these “players” and how these goals become activated and modified according to specific historical circumstances.

• Whose interests are being expressed in this text? Who is the audience for the text?

• What is the agenda? What is the argument being asserted?

• How is this agenda being justified? What is the rationale being advanced?

Although other entities could be identified and analyzed (such as estate factors), the following are certainly some of the most important players in these events.

Non-élite Highlanders (Tuath, the “peasantry”)

Given that the right to vote did not become universal in Britain until 1885, non-élite Highlanders had essentially no political power whatsoever before that; most had no financial capital, and the government did not recognize that they had any inherent right to live on their ancestral land. Furthermore, even into the end of the nineteenth century many Highlanders spoke no language other than Gaelic, and Gaelic could not be used in courts of law. The goals of the tuath (“rural Gaelic peasantry”) were to:

• Survive as individuals and maintain their families

• Prevent what economic assets they had from devaluating any further

• Protect their language and culture (which the government did not do)

• Maintain their pride and integrity in a humiliating and disempowering situation

Landlords

By the early nineteenth century, some landlords had Highland ancestry but many did not; as a rule, they were anglicized, and culturally and linguistically alienated from the Gaelic peasantry. Landlords by definition had economic capital (their land), and some degree of political clout. They were often well connected to centers of power and influence, and had almost absolute control over their land and tenantry. Their goals were to:

• Maintain their estates in the Highlands, and homes in other parts of the empire

• Find ways of making a substantial profit (a challenge in the Highland landscape) and (often) pay off debt

• Make maximal employment of tenantry with minimal costs

• Maintain their political and social clout amongst the higher ranks of British society

Estate Trustees

Accounting firms, usually based in Edinburgh, provided numerous services to the landed élite, including formal bankruptcy administration, auditing, judicial factories, curatories, executries and the factorships of estates. Accountants were appointed as trustees for the estates of landlords after they declared bankruptcy, which was a very profitable business and source of income for accountants. When this happened, very extreme measures were often taken to make the estate “profitable,” not least of which were clearances. When an estate was in the non-judicial control of trustees in this process, they did not have to make any concessions towards tenants. (For details, see Walker, “Agents of Dispossession.”) The goals of accountant-trustees were to:

• Pay off the creditors

• Reorganize an estate under their management to make it profitable

• Make their own profit in the process

Priests and Ministers

Clergymen were recruited primarily from the upper echelons of Scottish Gaelic society. They generally were concerned with keeping their congregations loyal to their own faith (keep in mind the political role of religion and the opposition between Catholicism and various branches of Protestantism). Although some took an interest in cultural and political affairs, this was not their primary duty. Until the Disruption of 1843, ministers in the Established Church of Scotland (the official state church) were directly appointed by the landlord; this meant that ministers of the Church of Scotland were effectively prevented from going against the policies and interests of landlords. Thus, Catholic priests and ministers in the Free Church tended to have more freedom to side with their congregations. Their goals were to:

• Provide spiritual services

• Prevent their congregations from going into another church

• Make whatever bargains necessary with landlords and government to maintain their positions

• Aid in “improving” Highlanders according to Anglo-British social and cultural norms

Emigration Agents

The exact nature and role of emigration agents changed a great deal between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries: some were tied to military interests, as when settlement in North America was part of a military strategy; some were tied to ship-owners and shipping businesses, whose ships would otherwise be empty returning to North America (having conveyed timber and other goods to Britain); others were paid by governments and land-owners to recruit settlers to take parcels of their vast estates and develop their resources. (There is a thorough discussion of emigration agents in Harper, Adventurers and Exiles.) Their goals were to:

• Sell as many people as possible on the idea of emigration

• Maintain a positive reputation in order to sustain their numbers

Understanding the Debate and Unresolved Political Dilemmas

One of the major reasons why the Clearances evoke such divisive and explosive debates in Scotland is that the inequities and onflicts that allowed these brutal acts to happen – conflicts of cultural authority, of political power, and of legal recognition of land rights – have yet to be resolved. (If you have any doubt about that, read the on-going work by Andy Wightman and Alastair McIntosh, for example.) As Sawyers’ fine volume Bearing the People Away: The Portable Highland Clearances Companion demonstrates, the Clearances have remained powerful symbols of injustice in the Gaelic psyche and have been continually evoked in songs, stories, articles and books.

(Ruins near north end of Loch Lomond – Image by Michael Newton)

Understanding the Clearances as the cultural tragedy it was for the Gaels requires acknowledging the following facts about these events (discussed in more detail in Newton 2009):

1. The context of cultural conquest. The Clearances were one of a series of oppressive measures imposed on the Gaels in the larger context of cultural conquest. The anglophone world (including the Lowlands) already harboured fantasies of exterminating the Gaels by the time of Culloden, and this sense of threat and alienation did not abate easily. The anglophone world felt it their right and perogative to impose its values, culture and policies on the Gaels “for their own good,” and these impositions have contributed significantly to deculturation.

2. Racism. Gaels were seen as being a distinct and inferior race to that of the Anglo-Saxon (and Lowlanders very consciously sided themselves with the English on racial equations). Social or agricultural problems were commonly attributed by anglophones to Gaels’ supposed racial inferiority.

3. 4th-world nationhood. Gaels had no political self-determination that allowed them to mitigate hostile external forces or address issues internally. Whenever a people is governed by another group who are antithetical to their identity, culture and language, the results are likely to be inimical to their survival. The subject state of Gaels within the British polity – which actively demanded conformity to English norms – left them vulnerable to the factors listed previously, and Highland areas still suffer from the democratic deficit.

In some modern histories, difficulties with climate, agriculture, and social structures are pointed to as causing underlying insecurity or instability in Highland life, making large-scale changes inevitable, especially when populations grew in response to improved medicine. However, there are many societies that experience these difficulties but that does not mean that they are begging for foreign peoples to take them over and impose “improvements” on them “for their own good” (which was exactly the rationale of colonization in the Age of Empires).

Do chronic problems with famine in Somalia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh or Iceland mean that these societies need to be taken over by “more developed” countries and have their languages and cultures “fixed”? Or should they have the right and opportunity to address their own problems on their own terms according to their own agendas? The colonial overtones of many conventional interpretations of the Highland Clearances ought to be obvious.

Despite having examined many Gaelic texts remarking on this period, I have yet to find a single text that complains about inherent difficulties with Highland climate, agriculture, or social structures that made life untenable, or a single person who said, “Thanks! We really needed your help to solve our problems. We’re glad to be rid of our inferior language, culture and land.”

A crucial article of which few people seem aware (it was pointed out to me by my friend Domhnall Uilleam Stiubhart) explains clearly the instrumental role of legal corporations in the Lowlands to impose change on Highland society, profit from it, and rationalize those changes with the language of modernity:

One of the themes which emerges from studies of the history of accounting and indigenous peoples is the conflict which results when accounting, with its association with capitalist values and the primacy of economic imperatives, is imposed on traditional cultures. Edinburgh accountants ventured to the Highlands and Islands imbued with a set of economic, social and moral values which clashed with those of the local population. In common with 19th-century projects for the oppression of indigenous peoples it is likely that accountants were insulated from feelings of remorse by adhering to prevailing assumptions about the inferiority of Highlanders and Gaelic civilisation, and the superiority of their own ideologies. This was most clearly revealed in those instances where detailed evidence is available about accountants’ decision-making. […]

Accountants were therefore, not simply applying their craft in a neutral, value free manner. While their decision-making was founded on the cold logic of maximising estate revenue and rendering property more saleable, it was also conditioned by prevailing ideologies about the progress of the capitalist economy, ‘improvement’ and social morality. In exercising their professional judgement in ways which dispos- sessed the impoverished crofters and cottars of the Highlands and Islands, senior Edinburgh accountants advanced the commercialisation of the landed estate and entrenched landlordism. Accountants were effectively agents in the acculturation of Scottish Gaels. Their activities were in accord with the contemporary “Establishment” who “treated the Highlands like colonies to be exploited”. Edinburgh accountants extracted their reward for the performance of this role in the accumulation of economic and social capital which underpinned their claims to professional status. Their role as trustees cemented an association with the landed-legal milieu at a time when professional organisation was being contemplated. (Walker 2003: 844, 846)

Here we have a very insightful study that clearly links the dark, repressive side of modernity (as asserted by Western European empires) with the “development” of the Highlands, and which unmasks the colonial assumptions embedded in many accounts about Highland society.

If it is no longer acceptable to rationalize the dispossession and displacement of other native peoples on account of their supposed inferiority (“The natives of X can’t exploit the land properly and it is our Manifest Destiny as the superior race to supplant them”), why is this same underlying conceit so seldom questioned about the Gaels? What effect has the hegemonic conditioning of British education had on delaying questions of this sort?

Select Bibliography

Marjory Harper. Adventurers and Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus. Profile Books, 2003.

Michael Kennedy. Gaelic Nova Scotia: An Economic, Cultural, and Social Impact Study. Nova Scotia Museum, 2002.

Donald Meek. Tuath is Tighearna / Tenants and Landlords. The Scottish Gaelic Texts Society. 1995.

Michael Newton. Warriors of the Word: The World of the Scottish Highlanders. Birlinn, 2009.

Michael Newton. Seanchaidh na Coille / Memory-Keeper of the Forest: Anthology of Scottish Gaelic Literature of Canada. Cape Breton University Press, 2015.

Stephen Walker. “Agents of Dispossession and Acculturation. Edinburgh Accountants and the Highland Clearances.” Critical Perspectives on Accounting 14 (2003): 813–853