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John Sinclair estimated that the typical crofter had to be able to obtain at least 200 days of additional work outside his holding to escape destitution.
Black cattle had traditionally been the peasant’s store of value and an important means of both paying rental and covering the costs of meal imports in seasons of scarcity.
Cattle stocks were diminishing over time and many small tenants and cottars by the 1830s had only one or two beasts, or none at all.
herring fishery also flourished as the shoals began to visit the western sea lochs on a more regular basis.
transformed communities likely to be made redundant by a more profitable
form of pastoral husbandry into a productive resource and a significant source of revenue.
Crucially, however, crofting helped to retain people in the region rather than induce the migration levels of the south and east districts of the Highlands,
where controls over subdivision were much more rigorous.
There is little evidence either that the ephemeral flow of income from kelp and fishing led to social mobility, planned investment or the emergence of a richer peasant class which might have given the western Highlands a degree of social resilience in the hard times after 1815. Instead, landowners creamed off the earnings during the good times through higher rentals, which were absorbed in their own consumer expenditure and that of their families.
Illicit whisky making on a commercial scale had virtually disappeared in most areas by the 1830s as a result of changes in revenue legislation and more determined measures of enforcement by the excise service.
Although the herring fishery survived and in some years in the 1830s managed to equal the good times of the 1790s, it was much more sporadic, and the erratic shoals could vanish from several lochs for long periods.
The maintenance of kelp production in some districts therefore restricted the outward mobility of the population, and probably also plagued estates through the perpetuation and intensification of subdivision.
In the event, disaster was averted in 1836–7 by the combined efforts of government, landlords and Lowland charities.
It was indeed a great irony that as clanship went into its death throes, the Highlands became even more militarized than in the recent past.
Clanship had metamorphosed into imperial service with the Gaels pioneering a role in the British military later to be assumed by other subjugated peoples of the Empire with renowned martial traditions, such as the Gurkhas, Sikhs and Pathans in Nepal and India. But
1800 the manpower resources of the region had become virtually exhausted, not only because of over-recruitment, but also as a result of death in battle, disease, discharges, natural attrition and, not least, emigration.
was perhaps surprising just a short time after Culloden that the British state determined to deploy Highlanders as a military spearhead of imperial expansion. Not only that, but the former rebels were to be regimented in distinctive and coherent units, officered by clan gentlemen, permitted to wear the banned Highland dress and encouraged to develop their own ethnic esprit de corps.
One of them was the brother of Ewen Macpherson of Cluny, who had famously hidden in a specially designed cage on Ben Alder in Badenoch for seven years after Culloden. He had set up the first private casino in Gaeldom, before finally escaping into permanent exile in France.
The Black Watch played a major role against the Indian nations in the brutal campaign known as Pontiac’s War in America in 1763.
By 1757 the number of Highlanders had reached 4,200 out of a total of 24,000 British regulars in North America.
Gaels used the same techniques of total war employed by ‘Butcher’ Cumberland’s men after Culloden in genocidal campaigns against the Indian nations between 1760 and 1764.
They harvested the population of their estates for the army in order to make money, in the same way as they established sheep walks, cattle ranches and kelp shores.
Lands for sons added an emotional edge to Highland history which was entirely missing from that of the rural Lowlands during improvement. This was another factor helping to explain the different emotional responses in each region to dispossession.
So potent was their appeal at the time that the Scottish military in general became Highlandized when Lowland regiments were ordered to be dressed in doublets and tartan trews.
bi-employments, including military recruitment, went into decline or vanished altogether after 1815.
were needed for kelp burning, fishing and army recruitment. An implicit alliance formed of government strategic concern and landlord vested interest caused emigration to be banned altogether in 1775.
We do know, however, that before the 1760s small numbers of Gaels, mainly from Argyll, were already moving in family and local parties to North Carolina, Georgia and New York.
Yet, as an exercise in collective self-help it was a time-limited strategy. Most of those who remained after 1815 suffered the full impact of the postwar collapse in incomes and increasing encroachment of sheep on land occupied by their cattle stocks. Few had the resources by that time to follow the example of those who had been fortunate enough to go before in earlier decades.
By 1832, for instance, the population of Glengarry in Upper Canada had climbed to 8,500 and doubled again to 17,596 twenty years later. The vast majority of them were Scottish Gaels or their descendants.
The state had introduced during the Seven Years War a system of paying off demobilized soldiers with grants of colonial land.
‘The Highlanders’ resistance, physical and moral, was bound to be very weak and the poetry of the period reflects this impotence.’
So, as the old warrior spirit was crushed, the people sank into fatalism, a process then hastened by the enormous appeal of evangelical Protestantism which completed the transformation of a martial society into a timorous and God-fearing crofting community.
However, some interpretations of so-called Highland passivity are problematic. For instance, to use the history of Irish rural unrest as a comparator with the Highlands is to follow a false analytical trail. The
indeed, some have suggested that Highland riots were in effect women’s riots. In a representative sample of thirty clearance and patronage disputes across the Highland region, women were involved in nineteen and in many of them they often took the lead while the menfolk at first held back.
Sometimes men appeared as transvestites, dressed in female clothing.
By the time of the Disruption the region had become a stronghold of popular and enthusiastic evangelicalism with a history of intense and deeply emotional religious revivals. There
key factor in this development was the influence of Na Daoine, translated as ‘The Men’. They
were lay preachers, so called to distinguish them from the ordained clergy, a spiritual élite, drawn mainly from better-off crofting and tradesman families, with powerful personal charisma, deep religious piety, detailed knowledge of the scriptures and, above all, an ability to blend the appeal of Christian spirituality with Gaelic tradition and imagery.
Even before it was established in 1843 the evangelical leadership in the Lowlands had been preparing the ground. Pamphlets and broadsheets in Gaelic were widely circulated.
In the last four decades of the nineteenth century, however, and thereafter, the contribution of the region as a proportion of the general outflow of Scots fell dramatically as the towns, cities and Lowland countryside became by far the dominant sources of large-scale Scottish movement across the globe.
By this system of extreme stringency a whole day’s work was required in return for a pound of meal, the theory being that only those facing starvation would accept support on such terms.
In essence a great philanthropic endeavour had been transformed into an ideological crusade to reform a population judged to be inadequate and in need of character improvement. It was an extraordinary outcome.
Many landowners were active, at least for a period, in supporting the inhabitants of their estates in the early years of the crisis.
For instance, only 14 per cent of all west Highland proprietors were censured by government officials for negligence, though in some other cases pressure had to be brought to bear to ensure that landowners met their obligations.
Some large Highland estates which were insolvent but not yet sold off were managed by trustees for creditors of the owner. They included the lands of Walter Frederick Campbell, proprietor of most of Islay; Norman MacLeod of MacLeod and Lord Macdonald in Skye and North Uist; Sir James Riddell (Ardnamurchan); Macdonnel of Glengarry (Knoydart); and Maclaine of Lochbuie (Mull), among others.
most trustees found it difficult to avoid the removal of crofters and cottars as the conversion of lands to profitable sheep farming was the surest and quickest method of maximizing income.
Significantly, historians have noted that some of the most heartless evictions of these years, like those in North Uist and Knoydart, took place on lands managed by trustees.
On the one hand, by the 1840s, the development of romantic Highlandism had made the region a fashionable tourist destination for the élites of British society.
For, unlike the pattern in Lowland rural society, where rulers and ruled shared broadly similar sets of social and cultural expectations, the Highland experience seems more akin to one of colonial dominion imposed on the region by outside influences:
market capitalism ultimately derived from the Lowland and wider British experience.
