Highland Clearances

[Editor's note:  the Highland Clearances are a controversial topic, subject to substantial historical interpretation.  This is just a generic background article for those who might not be familiar with the historical context.  To form the best opinion, you really need to study a variety of books on the subject and draw your own conclusions.  Nevertheless, regardless of your interpretation, it is clear that the Highland Clearances were an event of pivotal importance to the Clan MacNicol, the Scottish diaspora, and to the clan system in general]

The Highland Clearances were part of a process of agricultural change throughout the United Kingdom, but the late timing, the lack of legal protection for year-by-year tenants under Scottish law, the abruptness of the change from the Clan System in the Scottish Highlands and the brutality of many of the evictions gave the Highland Clearances particular notoriety. The Inclosures that depopulated rural England in the British Agricultural Revolution started much earlier, and similar developments in Scotland have lately been called the Lowland Clearances, but in the Highlands the impact on a Goidelic (Scottish Gaelic) speaking semi-feudal culture that still expected obligations from a Chieftain to his Clan led to vocal campaigning and a lingering bitterness among the descendants of the large numbers forced to emigrate, or to remain and subsist in crofting townships on very small areas of often marginal land. Crofters became a source of virtually free labour to their landlords, forced to work long hours, for example, in the harvesting and processing of kelp.

Clan chieftains

From the late 16th century the Scottish Privy Council required clan leaders to regularly attend at Edinburgh to provide bonds for the conduct of anyone on their territory, bringing a tendency for Chieftains to see themselves as landlords and become part of the British aristocracy. The lesser clan-gentry increasingly took up droving, taking cattle along the old unpaved drove roads to sell in the Lowlands. This brought them wealth and land-ownership within the clan, though the Highlands continued to have problems of overpopulation and poverty. The Jacobite Risings brought repeated government efforts to curb the clans culminating after the Battle of Culloden with brutal repression, genocide, and legislation from 1746 leading to the destruction of the traditional clan system and of the supportive social structures of small agricultural townships.

From around 1725 clansmen had been emigrating to the Americas with clan gentry looking to re-establish their lifestyle, or as victims of raids on the Hebrides looking for cheap labour. Increasing demand in Britain for cattle and sheep and the creation of new breeds of sheep, such as the black faced which could be reared in the mountainous country gave the landowners and Chieftains the opportunity of higher rents to meet the burden of costs of an aristocratic lifestyle. As a result, many families living on a subsistence level were displaced.