Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed, 1600-1900

Description

18th-century Scotland is famed for generating many of the enlightened ideas which helped to shape the modern world. But there was in the same period another side to the history of the nation. Many of Scotland’s people were subjected to coercive and sometimes violent change: traditional and customary relationships were overturned and replaced by the ‘rational’ exploitation of land use. ‘The Scottish Clearances’ is a highly original account of this sometimes terrible process, which changed the Lowland countryside forever, as it also did, more infamously, the old society of the Highlands. Based on an extensive use of original sources, it charts this tumultuous saga, with due attention to evictions and loss of land in both north and south of the Highland line.