 Спасибо, myndi i Majesty, and welcome Welcome to the Scottish Parliament and at the Festival of Politics 2018 My name is Ken McIntosh I´m the Presiding Officer here in Horyroad and it´s a delight to see so many of you here this afternoon Apologies for the delay in getting everybody in but I think you'll find it's worth it Before we introduce our guests As well as being here, and this is an interactive occasion so you're not just here to listen dwi'n fawr angen i'n ei fawr i'r fawr. Rwy'n i'n fawr i'n gweithio i gweithio i'w gweithio i'r fawr ydym ni'n garwad bach o wahanol oedd oedd eich pwyllgor o legacyw ac efallai i'r chyfodd o'i gweithio i fan hynny i gweithio. A oedd hyn i comel ei gweithio i gweithio i'u gweld o wahanol i'r pwyllgor i'n gweithio i'w gweithio i'w gweithio i'u gwahanol i'u gwahanol. Gweithio i'n bwysig yr baen rhywbeth ar nenodd y ffacebook. Felly, â bod yn gwneud, gyda'n mynd i fel y mae'n gweithredu'r hashtag FAOP 2018 yn trio hon, that's the festival of politics 2018 hashtag. OK? I'm delighted that we are joined today by Emeritus Professor Sir Tom Devine and Professor Stanna Nareddich, if I may introduce our two guests. Sir Tom Devine is an academic and historian. Born in Motherwell, Felly, rydw i'n ddweud o straffgladd unigwyrdyn niad i 1968, ac 20 ymwneud yw'r profiad yng nghyrch o'r hystiw Llywodraeth yn ymddangos i'r prinsibol a'r ddwylliant ddaeth. Tom rydw i Aberdeen unigwyrdyn niad i 1999, a dweud i'r unigwyrdyn niad i 2006, oedd yn gweithio i'r cyfrifysgau Cyngorol Llywodraeth a Llywodraeth i. i'r ddweud o'r ddwyllwch, yng ngorllwch, ac i'r rwyfynwyr ymddiadau yma i'r cenderfyn sydd yng ngorllwch yn diastro sydd. Sartom yn y peth oedd yng ngorllwch, oedd nifer 40 bwg, oedd yng Ngorllwch yn ymddirionedd yma i ymddirionedd ymddirionedd yma i. Rydyn ni'n cymryd i 100 arwag o'r graffau ar gweithio edrych â'r migraffau, gerbyn amgylchau a'r sgolwlltiau ac oedd yn cymryd yn cymryd. Felly, mae'n cymdeithasol i'r rhaid i ddweudio ysgolwyr, ac yn ymweld i'r ffwrdd a'r ffordd i'r meddwl, oedd yn y rhaid i'r ffordd. Stombe yn ystod o'r obe i'r newid yn 2005, ac mae'n digwydd i'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r studio'r hystioedd yng nghylch, yng Nghymru, oedd yn ei ddweud i'r rhaid i'r rhaid i'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r ffordd i'r UK all party parliamentary group on archives and history, Sir Tom Devine. Professor Stanna Nidadic graduated in economic history from Strathclyde University and her PhD in the same subject from the University of Glasgow. She spent a year at the University of Stirling before moving to Edinburgh University, where she became a school graduate director from 2009 to 2012. She is currently Professor of Social History and Cultural History at the University of Edinburgh, where her research has focused on the social, cultural and economic life of artisans and business owners, the middle ranks, gentry and professionals since the 18th century, mainly with reference to Scotland. Prior to her university studies, Professor Nidadic spent several years working as a theatrical costume maker and designer. She has a parallel interests in the material and visual cultures of the past, and is director of the Password Research Fund, a registered charity that promotes research into textile, fashion and clothing history. Her most recent book is titled Colouring the Nation, the Turkey Red Printed Cotton Industry in Scotland. She was appointed by Royal Warrant to be a commissioner of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, so, ladies and gentlemen, Professor Stannan Nidadic. Before we begin our discussion, I am going to ask Tom, if he will, to introduce and to talk to us, to give us a background on his most recent work, The Scottish Cluences. Tom. Thank you very much again, especially for those who are very generous and to Ruck Rwyr and Marks. Good evening, everyone. It is tremendous to see so many of you here, and especially to hear a presentation and a discussion on what is undeniably one of the key, perhaps most controversial, certainly emotive subjects in Scotland's modern history and to have the discussion in the chamber of our Parliament. It is a marriage of the topic and also the environment that we have here today. Also, by sheer good fortune, although Ken did not mention it, Stannan was one of my undergraduate students some time ago at Strathclyde University, and I certainly marked her out for high achievement of the type that she has now developed in the past several years. What I am going to do is to set the context in relation to this book, and then we are going to have a discussion. Perhaps the most important thing of all, as the Presiding Officer has said, is to give you an opportunity to comment and to make questions. The most important thing of all is to buy the book at the end of it, because at the end of it there is going to be a book signing, and our intention is to make this the biggest book signing of all time. There are security men on duty to make sure that you do not get out without purchasing a volume at the extraordinary low price of question mark. Let me try and set the context for the discussion. In 1814, Sir Walter Scott published what was to become the work that set him on to global stardom waverly or to 60 years since. By 60 years since, he meant from the Jacobite Rising of 1746. He has his anonymous commentator at the very beginning of the book saying that there has not been so complete a change in this country as there has been in any other state in Europe over the last 50 years or so. That has produced a group of beings in Scotland, in this kingdom of Scotland, as different from their grandfathers, as the present English are from those of the days of Queen Elizabeth I. In a nutshell, he captured in those sentences the sheer scale, the speed, the widespread nature of Scottish social economic transformation and, indeed, cultural transformation over that period. Quite simply, Scotland in 1840 to 1850 was a different place from the way it had been in the 1750s, 1760s. It was the time when all Scotland disappeared and modernity embraced the land. If you like, progress of change, not all of it necessarily good, has been the condition since that period of the late 18th, early 19th centuries. The motors for these enormous changes were industrialisation, the Scottish rate of industrialisation faster than that of England, which was more or less an evolutionary process. Extraordinarily, by the census of 1851, if you look at males in occupations such as mining and manufacturing, there was a slightly greater percentage number of those men engaged in mining and manufacturing per head of population than in England, which made Scotland, by that date, the most industrialised society on earth by that measure. Then massive urbanisation, so that by the census of 1861 Scotland had more people living in towns and cities than anywhere else in Europe apart from England. Finally, and what is going to be the focus of my brief words this evening and its fact is at the very heart of the book, The Scottish Clearances, is the process of rural change, the revolution that occurred. There have been two revolutions over millennia in Scottish rural society, as there have, of course, been in other rural economies and societies. The first was the so-called Neolithic revolution millennia ago, whereby human beings ceased mainly to be hunter-gatherers or fishermen and became farmers and breeders of stock. That was a decisive break with the past, but this process that I have outlined in this volume was just as revolutionary and it occurred over a much shorter timescale as Walter Scott's verdict on the speed of the process and the transformational nature of it. That process led to a huge increase in the productivity of land and a major boost to the nation's food-producing capacity. It had to because population was rising and also at the same time urbanisation, the number of non-food producers was increasing at the same time. If that had not happened, we might have faced an Irish-type catastrophe in this country by the time you get to the middle decades of the 19th, the middle decades of the 19th centuries. However, as I outline in the volume in this book, this change came at social costs. The social cost, the major social cost, was the extraordinary dislocation that occurred throughout Scotland, not simply in one region of it. The scale of dispossession, the fact that an old peasant society were virtually everybody who lived outside towns and cities and even villages, had some access to land, no matter how minuscule. Quite literally, that old world, which had existed in Scotland for God knows how long, was swept away in about 30, 40, 50, 60 years. Ironically enough, in Highland Scotland, especially crofting populations, still continued despite the trauma that many of their families had been through, still held on to patches of land. In Lowland Scotland and the Scottish Borders, the number of tenants was cut back drastically, so you are dealing only with a tenant farming elite by the time you get to the 1820s and 1830s. The old quarter class, who were given small areas of land in return for work at the busy seasons of harvesting and peat cutting, and one of the arguments in the book is that they probably made up between a quarter to a third, at least in many parishes of Scotland, a quarter to a third of the population. Those of you who can trace your ancestry back directly to Lowland Scots of the 17th century, there is a very good chance that you came from such quarter families. They had gone completely. I argue in the book against perhaps receiving wisdom that there was actually a greater extent of landlessness and a thoroughness in dispossession and clearance, even compared to the better known examples of Highland Scotland. That is what I was saying to the Presiding Officer earlier. Penguin, apparently, has been sending out a message that they have sent me up a flack jacket so that when I go north, which I am going next week to our place in the island of Mull, I can have some degree of protection against Gaelic invective and Gaelic opposition to some of the things that I have been saying here. I was conscious from the very beginning, because I have been thinking, reflecting and even writing about this for about between 30 to 40 years. I hasten to add not continuously I have been doing other things, but I am conscious of the fact that in this book there is a head on frontal challenge to some of the assumptions, the popular assumptions and even indeed some of the theories and theses advanced by historians, my colleagues. In order to therefore have a degree of conviction in what I am saying, there is a greater assembly in the book or based on the book of original sources, gleaned from archives, libraries, personal collections, even if you like, handed down the oral traditions of the people insofar as they can be collected today in the year 2018. There had to be real foundational strength in terms of the evidential base so that the generalisations and conclusions that I have reached could not simply be discarded. In a sense you could say continuous argumentation. It does not necessarily mean that this volume claims in any way to be definitive. What it does do is, it is my honest, impartial, but also creative response to the evidence that I have looked at. I approached the subject with an open mind, obviously hypothesis started to emerge and then of course the evidential base started to be shaped. This is what I believe to have happened. We await the reviews, we await your questions and of course we await the comments from the distinguished members of the panel. Remember, the vital reason why you are here is to do something at the end. Thank you. Thank you very much, Tom. Now, Staniff, I can turn to you. This is an area that you know well yourself. Your own book, Lyrics and Luxury, looked at part of this. So, as an 18th century historian, as somebody who has had the opportunity to read the book and heard Tom's remarks, what did it chime with your own view? Well, I mean, it's very hard to say anything about a book like this which is not part of my own long intellectual genesis as a historian of Scotland starting as a student of Tom Devine's. So, Tom Devine's work has obviously shaped the way I've seen many things. Tom probably doesn't know, doesn't perhaps know this, but I started as a student of English literature and found myself, in common with many undergraduate students, I think, when they start their degrees after a couple of weeks thinking, why am I doing this degree? Economic history was my outside subject and I was really astonished by how vivid it was, what an amazing department it was that Tom was part of those days. The history of Scotland was new to me. So, I bought the package, I bought the career, you know, and it served me very well indeed. Yes, I wrote a book, I mean, it's well over 10 years ago since I wrote about the Highland Gentry, but the story of the Highland Gentry and the period that I looked at is the other side of the coin that's explored in this book and of course I was absolutely delighted that Tom asked me if I'd speak at this event and be part of this event because a book like this is only something that can be produced after long reflection on the subject. It is the product of decades of assimilating such a wide range of understanding of the sources and the other scholars that have worked on the subject and I think what you see in this book is not just a real engagement, obviously, with the Highlands, though I suspect that's the area that most people will want to gravitate towards because that's where the controversy is. But it's an engagement with the other side of clearance, which is the lowland experience, which Tom has been the historian of for many, many years. Of course, Tom might well have taken it into the north of England. I come from the north of England and there is much of a similar experience to what you saw in the borders going on in the north of England as well. As I was reading the book and reading it the way in which there is an engagement with some of the myths, some of the passionately held beliefs, going back to the 18th century visceral understanding of what clearance means, then I was trying to think, Tom was exploring where is the protest in other parts of Scotland, is it there? I likewise was thinking where is the protest in England because much of that experience, and perhaps not the Gallic dimension, but some of that experience is there. I think you did mention the south-east of England, the degree to which the poverty and the desperate other side of the coin of agricultural monoculture grain production gave rise to astonishing levels of despair in the early part of the 19th century, and it's understood, but it's not understood in the way that, say, the Highlands situation is understood. I was also thinking about protest through poetry, people like John Clare, the peasant poet, living in Lincolnshire, writing about rural change and agricultural change in a very, very passionate way, but a sort of single voice. So addressing these complex layers of understanding through a book like this, I think is very important and is probably very timely as well. So Tom has given us something really to think about, but the work that I've done, not only on Ireland Gentry, but on other aspects of movement, like the movement to London, so I wrote on Scots in London in the 18th century, is the other side of the coin that's been explored here. We'll come back, if I can, to whether the depiction of the behaviour of the landlords that layers the Gentry in popular mythology or popular memory is accurate, too. If I can, Tom, I'm just picking up. So what you're saying—I've seen several things in this book, including that it wasn't just the Highlands that were cleared, it was the Lowlands that were cleared, but the popular mythology, the view that is perhaps shared by many of us here today about the Highland clearances is wrong. I've heard that from other historians too, but why have we got it? How has it become so established in popular culture that here we have people driven from the land by evil landlords to make way for sheep and driven out to the Americas or wherever else? How is that—well, it was perhaps the product of many other things, including a grievance revolution. How come that has become such an established fact, if we call it that, or certainly a myth? If you're referring to the Highland experience where it resonates powerfully, and it doesn't simply resonate in the consciousness of people historically, I truly believe that the Highland clearance, as so-called, has become part of Scottish culture, part of our sense of memory of where we came from. Arguably, it's the most famous or infamous subject in modern Scottish history. In terms of people's reaction to it, they may not necessarily know about it in detail, but there's a sense. As we were discussing just before we came on into the chamber, one of your parliamentary colleagues the other day referred to Brexit as possibly the source of another Highland clearance. As there are a lot of metaphors like that, which are used or shimolies or parallels drawn, there's absolutely no doubt about it. In terms of the folk memory of that period coming right down to the present day, there's a sense that dispossession was uniquely and specifically Highland. There's a number of reasons for it, and I explore the reasons in the book, because I find the tension between what people believe, mythology that is, and the evidence that's come through, which, of course, as a researcher's story, I've had the time to look at, but others cannot. It's a fascinating area to explain why given this truly enormous gulf, often, between the realities as the documentary historian discovers them and what people believe really in terms of a kind of social-cultural set of assumptions. As a number of reasons, don't let's forget the extraordinary allure of the Scottish Highlands. In the book, for example, I talked about, over the last 30 years, the number of monographs produced academic monographs—these are not popular books, these are serious academic analyses—compared to the number of books produced on the rural lowlands. It's something like somewhere in the early 40s, including Stanna's book, in the rural lowlands it's three or four. It's the Cinderella, if you like, of modern Scottish historical studies. Therefore, there's a glamour, and it seems insane to say this, given the suffering that people experience there, but there is a seduction about Highlands Scotland, which almost would require a psychologist to explain. It's partly the scenery, it's partly the romance of clanship—one of the reasons why this new Outlander series has been so popular throughout the English-speaking world, and perhaps beyond is, for one reason anyway, it's set on that extraordinary place of world-class scenic beauty. Then, of course, the other element in it has been the way in which, unlike again rural lowlands Scotland, from the middle decades of the 19th century right through until the 1960s and 1970s, the suffering of the Highland people has been displayed politically and also by writers, painters, artists, politicians, et cetera, et cetera. In other words, a high profile has been given to the Highland experience throughout that period. Finally, given the imprimatur in the very readable prose of John Preble in his book The Highland Clearances, not many of you will know, for example, that it is the biggest selling history book—that is Scottish historical history book—of all time. It is sold something of the order of 260,000 copies. My publisher is the same Penguin, and I recall my editor, and this is the fifth book that I've done with him since the Scottish nation over the 1990s. He's saying, well, one of the reasons we agreed to do it, Tom, is because of Preble's extraordinary success, because they thought maybe they would have another bestseller on their hands. Preble is a wordsmith, or was, and he is no longer with us. He knows how to write fluently. He knows how to engage people. He also writes in terms of what I call faction, that is, it is not absolutely clear what is entirely based on documentary evidence and what is not, because the stuff that he wrote is, by and large, not referenced or footnoted. It is a very easy read. My own volume is up there to some degree in the Amazon bestsellers list at the moment, but down in Scottish history bestsellers at number 17, waiting to attack, if you like. Keeping the powder dry is John Preble's The Highland Clearances. It's still selling well, and it portrays what happened in Highland Scotland as a struggle between good and evil. The greedy landlords who had prostituted their role as clan chiefs and the poor peasantry who had been betrayed by them. It's almost a morality tale, and that does powerfully appeal to people. But you're not denying that there were cases? The stories of Patrick Sellers, the factors of the Duke of Sutherland. Not at all. The thing, there's two aspects to then what you go on to. First of all, I'm not, in any sense, denying the incidents of clearance. Of course, there was massive clearance in the Scottish Highlands, but what I'm trying to say is that there's been a terrible imbalance. It's not very well known, just to give you one example, that clearance started in the Scottish borders, the western and central borders, the removal of people for stop rate to make large parks for cattle and then eventually large sheep farms. It started in the 1660s, 1670s. That was a full century before the Highland clearances. Ironically enough, the beasts, especially the great cheviot breed, the flock masters who had grown, started to grow wealthy over the previous century, before the middle decades of the 18th century, on sheep farming and cattle ranching in the borders. In other words, the entrepreneurs of new sheep farming in the Highlands were people who migrated north. In a sense, curiously enough, the Highland experience was incubated in the southern uplands long before large-scale sheep farming of that type began to penetrate Gildam. In no way, if people read the book, will they see any attempt to downgrade clearance in the Highlands? There is an attempt to say that this was a pan-Scottish development, and that's why the book is called The Scottish Clearances. I turn to you. Part of the popular assumptions about the clearances is that the land-owning classes themselves, either the clan chiefs or the lairs or the gentry, were more concerned with their own conspicuous consumption than they were the fate of their tenants or their clansmen and women. Is that the case that you found when it was your work? Basically, yes. So they spent the time here in Edinburgh. The key to my study is that this is a kind of narrative that the Highland gentry were more interested in their own family or their own consumption or their own income than they were on the people that lived on their estates. So what I sought to do in that book, though that wasn't the point of departure of the book. The point of departure about writing about the Highland gentry was really to explore the concept of luxury. So luxury is a very important 18th century economic idea. It's basically founded on the notion that one of the ways in which you get the economy going is by cultivating consumption. So that's an 18th century idea. It was replicated across Great Britain. The luxury trap. Yes, it is a trap. People like Adam Smith spoke about this and the moral implications of excessive consumption. One can spend a lot of time talking about how the economists balance these moral imperatives around an economic necessity. The gentry, the Scottish Highland gentry were no more than part of a bigger gentry population who had to kind of balance that with the utilisation of their land, the demands of their families, etc, etc, etc. And they got trapped into this business of making money and consuming. So one of the things that they do, and we know they do this in very large measure, and they do it partly to reconcile the fact that the land that they own is a relatively poor resource. You can only do so much with that part of Britain. They start to look for other devices to make money for the family, and one of the commoners is sending sons into the army. So that's great because you can, if you don't get killed, you can make money out of the army. And also because of the way of people in regiments in the 18th century, you take your regimental cohorts from the men that live on your land. So that is how all regiments are raised. So at one level you're serving a particular kind of agenda that feeds into clanship, so it kind of perpetuates ideas of clanship. But at another you're taking key members of prominent land-owning families into a professional world that is inherently luxurious and reckless and has less and less regard for the land. It is vanity fair, absolutely. If you send your second son into the army, your son goes age 15, he knows nothing about how to run an estate. If your eldest son dies and he's been trained as a lawyer because the best skill you have for running a estate in the 18th century is the legal training, if that army officer inherits the land, he hasn't a clue what to do with it. All he sees is a resource to take money out of it. So it becomes a kind of vicious circle that inevitably either leads to bankruptcy and many of these families go bankrupt long before they can clear the land, which means somebody else buys the estate and they have less connection to the people who live there. Or it leads to sales and many of these estates are sold and they become residents in Edinburgh. And the other dynamic is women who are no longer elite women, gentry women who are not part of the productive life of the state anymore. They cultivate a kind of gentility, they expect to live on annuities. So the kind of burden on estates is just going up and up and up and inevitably yes they do give rise to clearances. I think one of the things that's perhaps lurking behind all this is the extraordinary boom which starts about the mid 18th century and is still going on through to the end of the 19th century and that is rising population. When I worked a number of years ago in Scotland and Empire I was trying to understand why the Scots, especially male Scots, not least military Scots of the type that Stanna has described made such an impact on Empire because disproportionately the statistical evidence suggests that they did. It's not simply a Scotch myth if you will. But the thing was that I came across example after example of landed gentry in Scotland, not simply in the Highlands but across the whole country and of course it was exactly the same in England because they were going through the same population revolution of having 10, 11, 12, 13 sons. What do you do with them if you're a member of an elite because there's not simply a concern to make sure they're employed and they can earn their own living but there's also a concern to retain that in that kind of group psychology gentility and you know the fear that they will fall down and engage in downward social mobility to the dishonour of the family so the population factor together with what Stanna has described as the luxury trap it's almost like a device coming together and crushing them. Now in the book I tried to discuss the very vital point about will and subjectivity. Did these people who indulged in some of these activities like clearance which seems to us in this period of course so odious did they have a choice or were the forces so powerful that it was going to happen anyway because I do come across some examples of people resisting clearance and then only finally agreeing with their factors to do it when they were close to bankruptcy and of course in the book and elsewhere in the historiography is the clear evidence that the worst clearers of all were not the the gentry were not the descendants if you like of the clan gentry but were lowland trustees who were brought in when an estate went bankrupt and which in who in law in strict legal rigor their role was to make sure the estate was rebalanced its debts paid off so that it could be sold for the benefit of creditors that had awesome effects on the people on that on those estates because by the time you get to the 1820s 1830s 40s the only viable source of income for some of those highland lands was sheep farming with the usual implications I've got a number of other questions for you but can I just ask the audience if you do wish to catch my eye or ask question please just put your hand up and I'll do so the the gentry themselves I actually thought you or the clan chiefs and you book I thought you're relatively sympathetic to them because you were saying that they weren't so much lured by the the flesh pots of Edinburgh whatever you call the capital of Moses as they were forced to go because they had to appear before courts and they that was that was much earlier that was in the 17th century that that was part of what I call the growing encroachment of the state you see the clan I mean if you want to simplify this the clan system grew up in the early medieval Scotland and clan type structures were across Scotland in this period and they lived on to some degree in the Scottish borders but much longer in the areas for the state had limited control the essential rationale for clanship eventually of course it was it was bolted together by loyalty by tradition by centuries of relationships between kindred or stroke all kindred but its original rationale was people were looking for protection from great men and periods of instability when the state couldn't guarantee it so therefore the the as the state becomes stronger in these areas clanship type structures start to decay and the point you're making ken was in the 17th century late 16th early 17th century the Scottish state partly because of the union with England in 1603 the regal union began to flex its muscles more and you see the steady ebbing away of clan structures but they don't disappear because if they did disappear by 1745 six you wouldn't have had the capacity to call out men many of whom joined the not only the jacobite army but also through the the the various cadet branches of clan Campbell the Hanoverian army army as well so what you're addressing is something that did happen and the landowners or the clan chiefs or the clan gentry at that time had no alternative but to appear in court no alternative but to attend in Edinburgh sometimes even to be fined and of course one of the results of that was increasing cost and increasing cost started to finally result in increasing rentals and so you began to see a kind of landlord mentality a commercial landlord mentality developing out of the old kindred the old concern for print for kindred and you see therefore in the part of the chiefs the decay of that almost untranslatable term doochus and gallic which essentially means from the people's point of view that they have given blood service for perhaps generations to the elite families they've also had to pay rental and in return for that they wish to have guaranteed protection from the elite within the bounds of the clan and that is why unlike the position south of the highland line clearance was the worst possible violation of that particular contract it wasn't a legal contract it was much more important and significant it was a kind of bond and blood and as stunning in it she's just said a few minutes ago what you get after Culloden is not the removal of those bonds you get almost a kind of renewal of them because the highland gentry start to become military entrepreneurs they build up highland regiments and in a sense negotiate with the british state to employ them during these great wars of the seven years war the american war of independence and the revolutionary and Napoleon wars and in you know recall particularly some papers i looked at in armadale castle in sky the mcdonald papers there lands given in return for shuns lands given in return for shuns in other words the agreement was or so the people thought that in return for the males of the family enrolling in the family regiment of the elites or the landed class at that time which was perhaps more important than relevant to say that there was a guarantee of possession and land there's obviously as you can tell it from some of the evidence given and also from some of the oral traditions of the time that the people honestly believed that that guaranteed them continued and perhaps even perpetual possession of land and that is why when that sacred bond in a sense a blood bond because it was quite common place for husbands and sons to die abroad not necessarily through combat but through disease that was remembered and that had an effect on the societal attitude in a way that removal in lowland scotland didn't have to the same extent because in lowland scotland it had been agreed agreed for generations that if a tenant came to the end of term the landlord had a perfect legal right to remove them or at least not to renew the tendency and bring in somebody who is perhaps more skilled and able to pay a higher rental that was a legal construct whereas in gildum and especially in the western highlands and islands there was a quite different connection and that is again one reason to answer your earlier question ken why in a sense the the impact the psychological impact on the the collective attitudes of the people it was more profound than anywhere else in scotland and i should say that there are you know many people amongst the island gentry could see what was happening but it is kind of relentless and i recall reading some of the papers of the malcoms of pultala and so the estate owner was a Jamaican slave owner living in london fantastically wealthy merchant sending money back to the estate yeah absolutely his younger brother lived on the estate and around the estate and he's writing letters to his older brother saying the people would like you to come and live amongst us we want you to live here he's writing back saying i can't you know i'm making big money here i'll be back next year or five years time and it is you know people could see the writing on the wall but the the the kind of pressures are relentless to undermine the system now i want to ask a question about the the physical scars that the the the clearances have left because i thought i actually one of the things i liked about your book i liked a little about your book but it was talking about the bringing the the life that the people lived on the land and those that were in many ways invisible to us because they weren't registered but you talked in particularly i think about the lowlands in the lowlands that that the cotters they actually lived in houses that were pretty well recycled when you put it and and when they when they were moved around and they were moved around a lot so although they had a link to the land it was different bit of land they'd actually take their door and their roof beams with them yes well particularly the roof the roof timbers they were i mean not only in lowland scotland right across scotland that was the most valuable part of the of the house and one of the things you do find during clearance that normally the people would be allowed to take them away because my reckoning and it's i try to demonstrate it in the volume is that in the first instance in highland scotland the process was one of resettlement in the later 18th century what what what the what was known at the time was crowding in that is people who were moved out of a particular area who were moved into another township which of course you know therefore the land was was cut up the land was divided in lowland scotland the pattern was slightly different there's this remarkable proliferation of village development and so you find the former the former cutters they don't all emigrate to america or to the towns they're kind of relocated in this mushrooming of village development because in the early period ken in the early period of industrialisation much of the textile activity and other forms of handicraft activity took place in rural villages not in the big cities so there was the possibility of redeploying them but the big the big difference in my view which is one of the reasons i get interested in this when i started to research a book called the great highland famine in the 1980s is and i always tell the children this when we go up there and now the grandchildren look for the marks on the land because you know our place in mal where you can see the phoenic in that is the cultivation beds when the brackens down people have gone but those raised sandwiches of soil are still to be seen all over the area in a in a parish which today has no permanent resident but had 450 at the census of 18 of 1841 and equally of course there's the ruins not everywhere but one of the most emotive things of going to places if you know where to go is to see the former the former townships obviously incomplete because to go back to your word recycling a lot of the dry stain dykes the new farm houses which were built were constructed out of the stone that were originally part of the dwelling of a the dwelling of a family so the thing about the western highlands and islands that at least parts of that area what happened is still visible on the land in lowland scotland and border scotland it's vanished there is again the recycling process took place with the building materials particularly stone being used for other purposes but partly because it happened earlier than what happened in the highlands you would be you would have great difficulty it's not entirely impossible especially in some of the river valleys of the borders but you would have difficulty getting that kind of iconic archaeology which makes visits to certain parts of the highlands so extraordinarily remarkable you know to see these places in in locations of aching scenic beauty and the thing that's missing of course are the roofs because they were always taken off because they if you didn't do that then the landowner was kept to continue to pay rates and of course above all the people you don't get that sense in lowland scotland which is again one of the reasons for the amnesia and the romanticism perhaps i know the very place i'm from in the Isle of Skye the village of Elgal is the end of the Strathair peninsula there's six miles down there's a village called Sushnish which is still there an entirely cleared village and Borregg so again put your hand up if you want to come in here and and ask a question there's another theme that runs in your book and i don't know if you want to come in the stana too which is there's a difference between the people of the lowlands and the highlands too the people of the highlands are Celts they're speaking Gaelic but what's interesting in your book you're talking about both this growing romanticism so you start off actually talking about the highlands as a as a pretty miserable bleak gloomy desperate place to live but then after stevensson and others and various divers come it changes and it becomes this romantic allure builds up but at the same time this is happening the Celts themselves the gales are really i mean you call it racism i mean that they are they are looked down upon oh yes i've been by the time by the time you get to the middle decades of the 19th century you've got this extraordinary duality of the romantic vision of the highlands scott of course being quite influential in that but there are a number of other reasons the highlands is a romantic place but at the same time in other quarters and other social strata in the lowlands there is the beginnings of vicious racism the notion that the Tewton that is the lowland scott mainly and those from the northern isles the Tewton is much superior to the Celts i mean there's this extraordinary analysis that's drawn the the Celts has been pushed because of racial inadequacy from europe to ireland and to the maritime areas and the insular districts of the scottish highlands this is a reflection so some of these individuals who are undeniably racialist authors this is the conclusion they drew about why people lived in ireland and the western highlands and islands and this comes out very clearly during some of the attempts to provide charity for the people of the highlands during the great potato famine of the 1840s early 1850s the big the the if you like the intellectual and bureaucratic boss of much of the charitable activity and especially government activity was one Sir Charles Trevellian and his his edict was we must prevent the leprosy of ireland that is the poverty and famine crisis in ireland from crossing the crossing the iris sea and in order to avoid that he said we'll have to get rid of at least 40 000 of these inadequate Celts and bring in their replacement and this is spelled out clearly in the book 40 000 germans because they can be guaranteed not only to have the superior intellect but the work ethic that these inadequates that the work ethic that these indolents do not have because that mindset articulated the view that the reason why in the work the richest society on the planet aka Great Britain at that time that there was actually a famine people you know were potentially starving must be because of their own collective fault and this sentiment was extremely important one of the things again if you talk about the marks in the land of the time the area is covered with tracks destitution roads by which famished people were given one pound of meal per day in order to earn their corn through working because the ethic of the time was and this you know but dealing with people who are suffering severe and acute food shortage the ethic of the time was that if we allow them free food that will further demoralise them in other words will affect their character and there will be no recovery so it's um it's a better period we're having the same debates in politics today as i'm sure you're aware so it's worth saying that this idea of their being that wasn't thought thus this isn't how the highlands were viewed in the 18th century there's very much the idea the noble savage was you know the gallant race the ocean this is something that reaches its peak and it's a kind of victorian because if you look at these ideas are applied in different ways in in a city london the idea of the residuum that the poor are kind of an entrench group whose poverty is their own i mean it's interesting to if you look at the newspapers who were who had this at the very heart of their editorials two of them exist to this day the one that's now called the herald rather than the glasgo herald and the scotsman and there was another the jonna groats journal which is no longer no longer with us and the invernest were two invernest papers one of us was very much pro people the other was bitterly racist in its in its attitude so that then explains ken why by the time you get to the 1840s 1850s you get some of the most draconian clearances in the highlands because the people who managed these processes in a way which didn't happen in the earlier period thought these people were almost subhuman and they could be treated in a certain way which of course never happened at all in that particular way in lowland scotland so again the wound was deeper the wound was deeper and more penetrating and the collective memory in a peasant based society remembers it i mean one of my favorite one liners if you like from history of peasantries in europe the great french historian pier jubair who wrote a mammoth work on the peasantry of the bouvet in the bouvet z in in france and no peasant willingly gives up his land be it only half a furrow so there you had this extraordinary almost epical epic conflict between the values of these these racist thinkers i think strongly influenced eventually by darwin you know the survival of the fittest and on the one on the other hand this ethic of the people who despite the fact that seem to be living in depressed poverty we're still wanting to cling to that patch that patch of land a couple of contributors here would come in first of all the gentleman there with the microphone i mean there's another gentleman up here i don't know whether this is working or not it is we can hear you thank you um could you mention cultural differences the main one of course being that the two two parts of scotland spoke a different language from it from each other and that must have made the highlanders more remote and more isolated than the otherwise it would have been if they could understand each other and then of course they only got the the translation of the bible fairly late and so culturally they were in limbo almost well of course this this helps to explain again um these if you like this these differentiated attitudes stan has talked about the view of the kind of 18th century view of the noble savage then you get the kind of early 19th century view of the highlander as warrior because of the highland regiments and the tremendous pride that they are instilled in scotland because of their prowess on the field of battle not least of course at at waterloo but then partly because of this devastating failure of society you get the third differentiating thing and of course an important differentiator is language so it's quite easy to see these people as alien and different and it's not all that far when you get to a catastrophe as you had in the 1840s and 1850s to think of them as different in other ways as well that they're not really the same as us um that is um this is the this is the view of certain members of the educated middle classes and to a degree upper classes in lowland scotland i'm not painting with a broad brush that's not necessarily the view of everyone but it was certainly the view of some influential people and unfortunately for the people of the highlands in particular these influential people were at the heart of the charitable activities that took place at during that crisis so yes you know the sense of difference the sense of the other may also have been affected in lowland scotland by the fact that they spoke a different dialect sorry a different language but before i bring the gentleman here would you would it be fair to see you can see the traces of that in attitudes to gallic today i mean even today in scotland although the scottish parliament has passed a gallic language act to try and stabilise the language and recognise its authenticity there is there is clear hostility still to gallic in many parts of scotland these things don't vanish um very readily and especially if there's a sense of the other and especially if the other is a minority and struggling to assert its um its sense of identity it's not surprising that there are elements among the majority especially if it involves taxation and funding who are going to feel it this can i bring in the facebook audience here gentlemen up right at the back there can i just thank professor divine for wonderful comprehensive which sounds to me like a comprehensive treatment in a great book i'm a geographer so i venture into history a little bit with some trepidation you you began at the by asking but by saying why is there is this imbalance between what happened in the lowlands and what happened in the highlands and you made it sound initially a bit puzzling but since then you've given all kinds of explanations the landscape the culture the right and so on could i just suggest maybe one small well two small further factors that so many of the well in some cases the people cleared off the land in the highlands went to canada as communities and settled in canada as communities and they remembered as a community what had happened to them and so you can find some monuments for instance the island of aran to clearance clearances that happened there put up by canadians so then of course maybe an obvious thing these traumatic things in the highlands happened when there were more there were newspapers there were reporters there were journalists who could and people to observe how horrible it was in some cases and then maybe another perhaps less tangible thing and rather speculative the well-recognised symbols of scotland tartan bagpipes whisky and so on really come out of the garlic culture and that in some ways tends to erase lowland culture to some extent it gets played down out you know outside scotland and but of course the the highlanders migrating to the the industries and cities in the in the lowlands took the culture with them and that's what perhaps helps to explain but why that we have these as our national symbols but um okay it's okay because so the in parliament do you only get one question you're already into your third okay so well these are just some comments thank you the interesting thing was you you actually made a set of comments rather than questions and all I can say to you is in the great detail all of them are in the book so if if if you want if you want the evidential base as I keep calling it for your your your arguments then you'll you'll find that a plenty in there there's just one last thing I would like to say about what I call I call it highlandism you've called it tartanry um and let's face it um the the world that I'm talking about and it's not it's not the world as existed it's what I call designer highlandism you know the stuff that people wear in burns nights and at weddings etc it's in fact I actually called it in a recent work I did neo-highlandism because in the 50s I don't know if you any either of you can remember this but I can in the 1950s early 1960s it used to be said that only members of the arm forces and Tory gentlemen walking down Princess Street wore kilt and now it's everywhere at weddings and graduation ceremonies I don't see it as often yet at funerals but it's coming because there is something extraordinarily seductive about highlandism at my last graduate student a Swiss German called David Hesse he's now a senior figure in one of Zurich's biggest newspapers he produced a thesis and it's known a book called warrior dreams and it's about this extraordinary thing this craze that exists between Moscow and Stockholm of people dressing up as highlanders the pipe bands military enactments all sorts of related activities none of them have ever been to Scotland none of them have any Scottish blood he counted something of the order of 3,800 of these spectacular events which were going on interestingly enough none of them in the Mediterranean areas it was all northern Europe he's even he came up with the bizarre conclusion until he verified it with the historians great asset of reference to evidence namely that Bavaria was an obsessive centre of this cult because Hitlerism had destroyed traditional German folk culture in that part of Germany so they had adopted highlandism as an alternative set of mythologies and this is why eventually ladies and gentlemen I came to the conclusion that not only did I acquire a sociologist as part of the supervisory team for David but also a psychiatrist you know it was just it was beyond the sorry to use the word ken ken but it was beyond the ken of a mere historian why this is and so if you then go back to Scotland to Scotland what we have done we have adopted a form of sartorial nationalism one of the great assets of course advantages of that in terms of visitor attraction is we now have probably the most globally recognised national dress dress of any ethnicity in the world and of course this was building up in the late 18th early 19th centuries at the same time as the real highland society not the designer highlands was being torn apart by eviction by destitution by the failure of various economic activities and not least by famine i have a great lover in terms of my trade a great lover of paradox problem puzzle this is one of the reasons why we have such a wonderful laboratory for studying the human past in a manageable context as scotland this is why we are envied by historians throughout europe because there's so many aspects to our history that are part of some of the great themes of historiography but because we're relatively small sized because we were going only a relatively small population doing that in terms of what the french call histoire total total history is manageable in a way which very difficult for example in russia very difficult in the usa but we can manage it and that is why that is one of the reasons why a semi witty journalist a couple of years ago called scottish historical studies the new rock and roll this is actually an area certainly textiles and development and design in scotland is an area of your expertise and speciality did i think of the tartanisation of scotland as being a relatively new phenomenon that the the Celtic Highlanders didn't actually go around in in kilts the way that we no of course not because they they couldn't have made that kind of fabric in peasants society it is an early 19th century lowland industrial manufacture i'm very successful yeah and the big firm wasn't buying born wasn't it the big firm largely supplying the military actually that's the big market it's the military market i can see a lady right there now if you just yes the microphone on your desk if you put your hand up they'll put a mic they'll put the microphone on your desk on there we are yes yes that's good because that's the way they speak to you in parliament exactly and that's why you can control them because you just turn it off and they often answer by saying i can't answer that now but i've got a book outside so from my studies of scotish history in the 1960s i was certainly taught about the clearances and about the home industry the domestic industry in terms of industrialisation in scotland but these were taught in two distinct and separate parts so it's an interesting idea that you're putting across that the clearances should be seen throughout sort of scotland really but can I just clarify it is the case still the view still that these the clearances in the highlands were mainly compulsory evictions where people had little choice and were driven off of the land and hence many people emigrating or trying to eek out an existence in other parts of scotland but i'm still the belief that it's still correct to think in terms of the clearances that you're referring to in lowlands scotland it was very is it still the case that it was the choice that people did work at home at the time of the beginning of machinery and industrialisation but is it that people still had a choice to leave the rural areas and move into the towns because they thought that there were the possibility of better conditions or that there was more they would eek out a living in a better way or is that is it that the industrialists somehow pulled the people i don't understand that bit so right the it's pretty very difficult to summarise important elements of a 500 page book but but that's one of the reasons why i suggested that there's one way of dealing with that problem at the beginning but the point i would i would make to you is this that the gael had considerable knowledge of opportunities elsewhere in scotland because one of the phenomena that kept people alive really after the decline of so many of the by-employments like kelping illicit whisky making and eventually also military employment after 1815-20 was the combination of potato cultivation some grain cultivation sending the odd the odd cow south in the the droves to the south but above all temporary migration that is sending the young south for the harvest but not simply that because the migration became temporary they would go sometimes for four five six months in the year one of the key sources for the book is the census and numerators returns not the actual official census but the notebooks taken are used by those who went round the places that they still do to this day so there's 96 of these paddishes if you like which which i've looked at or myself and my research assistants looked at for the censuses of 1841 51 and 61 and in the notes alongside the numbers they will tell you in great detail and specifically those who are not there on census day because they're elsewhere working in the south or in the fisheries or whatever but the most significant point of all i would like to make well that sounds over modest and sorry that sounds immodest that a key point i would like to make to you is and again i worried and await this to try and get an explanation of it the population of the four highland counties rose throughout the classical period of clearance now if this was a tutorial which isn't i'd be pinning you against the wall saying okay you've done your reading how'd you explain that how what's the explanation for that that clearance apparently means depopulation and yet there was much more emigration and out migration after 1861 than there was during the classic period of clearance between the 1790s and the 1840s and 1818 sorry 18 late 1840s into the early early 1850s there is an attempted answer in the book but it brings into focus the fact that there is a considerable distinction ladies and gentlemen between the scholars analysis of the evidence and the beliefs obviously you know we're professional this is my trade and in the same ways that i join or a plumber you get to know the the detail the inside stories of the thing and it's fascinating i one reviewer actually i think it was in the hell newspaper said okay a lot of the mythology is corrected or challenged but the end result of what tom divine comes out with is actually in a sense at least as dramatic as the old stories and that is that that was a fantastic thing for that reviewer to say because that's exactly the way i feel about what has been discovered as a consequence of looking at this this huge subject which is so much at the heart almost of a sense of Scottish identity so it's been a privilege working on it and will almost certainly be as a result of complete intellectual exhaustion my my penultimate my my penultimate book penultimate maybe maybe we are going to come to an end shortly we started late so i'll just let it run on a little bit but i can't i'm afraid other events are on the building and including here we've got two contributors up in the cheap seats um if we can just get sorry just talking cheap cheap joke the gods the gods actually before like you can just also comment on this was a contributor here on social media saying um people were cleared from the land but actually they weren't allowed to emigrate there was an act of parliament which would stop them emigrate this is the other aspect to this story plan ken the the detailed analysis of what clearance was and obviously since we're having a broad discussion we don't want to want to go into definition about it but it varies enormously from place to place there are at least 15 cogent reasons why people were cleared or evicted or moved as i again try to analyse in the volume and at the same time it varied over time so this this gentleman in social media is referring to a time when the landlords were totally opposed to out migration which was the case until about 1815 1820 when they have what they call a redundant population and they want rid of them but during the earlier period they practiced a kind of duality um they would lease the interior glens to sheep farming and sometimes cattle ranching people would move to the coast where they would be settled in crofts the croft was and this was well thought out in terms of the literature of the time the croft would be cut to such a level cut to such a size that the people could not gain an entire annual subsistence from it they had to work in fishing or kelp gathering and burning and a few other activities including including military employment uh that stanagh referred to stanagh referred to earlier um so that um that that was a way to earn two sources of profit first of all from commercial pastoralism but keep the people on the land which was the case down to about the 1815 1820 1825 period and exact profit from their labour power do isn't young ladies there and then the gentleman there uh can you hear me here we can hear you yes good evening um earlier you talked about sort of inevitable economic forces as it being the cause of the clearance with a little bit it seems odd to sort of avoid the issue of agency and choice and attributed to this force kind of beyond human agency and jurisdiction um i mean stanagh yourself you talked about um the luxury trap and bankruptcy could you explain the issue of culpability a bit more in terms of landlord and the clearances sorry yes well the question is and if you could pass the microphone to the gentleman up at the back there you got one the the question is really that we we're talking about the difference between choice and compulsion yes but actually the in a time of changing economic factors um it's really more about agency and culpability in other words they may have a choice on paper but they don't really have any choice and they don't have any agency and it's it's and therefore the people are still guilty no no i mean there's two things they are totally agree with what simply implied implied point in the question namely the people had in certain terms of remaining in possession of land they had no choice whatsoever one of the other major sources in the book is the so-called summons of removal which is the legal document compelling the tenant um to remove usually at witson because the argument was that was a more benign period when the weather was theoretically becoming a bit better rather than to do it at martin was so and there was removal in the spring period compelling the tenant his entire family his cotters his servants any associates kindred exactly for example who would cut up part of the the holding and used it you know during a kind of process of subdivision and one of the reasons we know about clearance is because of these events for people where people resisted the summons and therefore the sheriff officers were brought in the police and occasionally also the armed force of the state but overwhelmingly i would go so far as to pick a figure out of the urgency 96 97 96 97 percent certainly in the lowlands but even in the scottish highlands took place peacefully the people realised the power the power of the state they had no leverage they had to go um and really you could argue therefore that protesting would simply have made matters worse because it would have extracted the wage earning males from the family unit because there'd be as gordon jackson formally of this house msp used to refer to i'm off to the jail tom sorry he's a qc so he wasn't saying he was going to jail he was simply saying he was going to interview you know clients in the jail so there was the sense that um they would be found unambiguously guilty if they if they divorced the sheriff officers if they refused the edict of the summons and that's one of the reasons why although there was protest in the highlands and hardly any at all on the lowlands because people were prudent enough to realise it would be counterproductive so yes the the the whole the whole setup of economy outside people's control the power of those who own the land rather than those who actually were given temporary possession of it was such that their agency was very limited but it was not nonexistent because if you go back to that earlier period when is the person in social media said the landowners try to prevent immigration we know from that period that a lot of the immigration occurred before the the the beginnings of destitution in the 1820s 30s and 40s serious destitution when people simply don't have the resources really to move to the same degree in that late 18th century period there was much collective movement the gentleman talked earlier on about communities to canada that was the period when that type of immigration was at its height it was a form of almost collective self-help and it was community community movement regrettably what happened after 1815 20 was very much more individualised and very much more outwith the control of the people in fact it became known by the 1840s 1850s as compulsory immigration they faced the bleak choice of eviction or eviction plus assisted transportation across the atlantic or eventually by the mid 1850s to australia i'm conscious that we're coming to that very last comment from the gentleman at the back yeah i haven't yet have the the benefit of reading the book but one one of the aspects in terms of if you look at it from a global perspective there were a lot of things going on in the 18th 19th century which basically was if you want to interpret it as the modern world and the modern world was imposing on the the old world different ways of doing things and this happened certainly in the uk but it happened all over the place connect and you could argue that that shall we say the the the gaelic cultural the highland culture was very much of the old world so it was more spiritually based it wasn't related to an economic definition of how you should lead your life and i just wondered whether this this was an aspect that was was covered in the sense that the impact of the modern world on scotland in the 18th 19th century was in in a way uh shall we say overturning uh millennia of the way that people lived and looked at the world yes i think that very much is before to bring in tom stanagh can you just ask for you oh yes i mean um the gaelic culture became commodified and that is part of the modern world so um outsiders people like pennant or johnson visited the highlands as tourists and you start to see the beginning of the modern tourist industry in the highlands and the building up of um tour guides and armchair tourists and collecting of songs and it's kind of transformed into another kind of cultural experience but it's an experience that's divorced perhaps from some of the traditions um so it's not as though it's sort of cast in aspect it is changing but the change is incorporating other it becomes music but you know Mendelssohn visits the highlands it becomes poetry but it's the romantic poets it's William Wordsworth who writes about the solitary highland lass um so that culture is part of the modern world but it's part of the modern world that sets up a dissonance with those who have that as part of their native culture okay thank you tom yes you mean yeah i mean undeniably in terms of what you're saying the thing the first thing to remember is this these processes were inaugurated in this country that is in england and scotland the systems that were created especially on land were almost unique in this period certainly in the 18th and early 19th centuries to scotland and england so they were the pathbreaking especially in rural society they were the pathbreakers of the route to what you would now call modernity in other words what we saw in this period was nothing less than the fragmentation of the old world of tribalism if you want to refer to clanship in that sense of tribalism and subsistence living present subsistence living with a foothold in the land and what what was in place by the end of the period certainly in scotland by the 1840s 1850s though not in many other parts of europe has to be said was the triumph of market capitalism tom stand i have to say i've got a thousand more questions including i was going to ask all these political questions on the agenda today but we haven't had a chance however as i'm sure you are not unaware so tom is going to be available for book signing down in the lobby immediately after so and there are various other events still to go on this evening and also tomorrow so please join us can say thank you very much to you for your time thank you to stanlan harrach and to tom divine