The Scottish Clearances

Author : T. M. Devine
Publisher : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 0141985933
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Scottish Clearances written by T. M. Devine and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A superb book ... Anybody interested in Scottish history needs to read it' Andrew Marr, Sunday Times Eighteenth-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, as traditional ways of life were overturned by the 'rational' exploitation of land use. The Scottish Clearances is a superb and 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 a vast array of original sources, this pioneering book is the first to chart this tumultuous saga in one volume, with due attention to evictions and loss of land in both north and south of the Highland line. In the process, old myths are exploded and familiar assumptions undermined. With many fascinating details and the sense of an epic human story, The Scottish Clearances is an evocative memorial to all whose lives were irreparably changed in the interests of economic efficiency. This is a story of forced clearance, of the destruction of entire communities and of large-scale emigration. Some winners were able to adapt and exploit the new opportunities, but there were also others who lost everything. The clearances created the landscape of Scotland today, but it came at a huge price.

Author : Peter Aitchison
Publisher : Casemate Publishers
ISBN 13 : 0857909673
Total Pages : 163 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Lowland Clearances written by Peter Aitchison and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2017-07-27 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The forced removal of family farmers across the Scottish Lowlands in the 18th and 19th centuries is chronicled in this enlightening social history. The Scottish Agricultural Revolution came at great cost to the poor cottars and tenant farmers who were driven from their homes to make way for livestock and crops. The process of forced evictions through the Highlands known as the Highland Clearances is a well-documented episode of Scottish history. But the process actually began in the Scottish Lowlands nearly a century before—in the so-called Age of Improvement. Though largely overlook by historians, the Lowland Clearances undeniably shaped the Scottish landscape as it is today. They swept aside a traditional way of life, causing immense upheaval for rural dwellers, many of whom moved to the new towns and cities or left the country entirely. With pioneering research, historian Peter Aitchison tells the story of the Lowland Clearances, establishing them as a significant aspect of the Clearances that changed the face of Scotland forever.

Author : Alexander Mackenzie
Publisher : Mercat Press Books
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 592 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The History of the Highland Clearances written by Alexander Mackenzie and published by Mercat Press Books. This book was released on 1883 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The tragedy of the Clearances, brought about by cynical, often absentee landlords, is a black page in Scotland's history. Written while the effects it describes were still unfolding, Mackenzie's history brings the distress before the reader.

Author : Eric Richards
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 0748629580
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Debating the Highland Clearances written by Eric Richards and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2007-07-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Storm clouds always gather over the story of the Highland Clearances. The eviction of the Highlanders from the glens and straths of the Highlands and Islands of the north of Scotland still causes great historical dispute more than a century after the events. The Highland Clearances also generated a great deal of contemporary controversy and documentation. The record comes in diverse forms and with radically different provenances, offering excellent material for exercises in historical analysis and selection. Debating the Highland Clearances introduces the Highland Clearances as a classic historical problem. Eric Richards reviews the historical debate and examines the methods and sources employed by the combatants past and present. The debates among historians, novelists, politicians and economists are no less passionate today and raise major questions about interpretation and the appropriate frame of reference for the noisy and continuing public debate about the Highland Clearances. This book prese

Author : James Hunter
Publisher : Birlinn Ltd
ISBN 13 : 0857902628
Total Pages : 426 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Set Adrift Upon the World written by James Hunter and published by Birlinn Ltd. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of Saltire Scottish History Book of the Year They would be better dead, they said, than set adrift upon the world. But set adrift they were - thousands of them, their communities destroyed, their homes demolished and burned. Such were the Sutherland Clearances, an extraordinary episode, involving the deliberate depopulation of much of a Scottish county. What was done in the course of that episode was planned and carried out by a small group of men and one woman. Most of those involved wrote a great deal about their actions, intentions and feelings, and much of it has been preserved. There are no equivalent collections of material from those whose communities ceased to exist. Their feelings and fears are harder to access, but they are by no means irrecoverable. In this book James Hunter tells the story of the Sutherland Clearances. His researches took him to archives in Scotland, England and Canada, to the now deserted straths of Sutherland, to the frozen shores of Hudson Bay. The result is a gripping, moving, definitive account of a people's struggle for survival in the face of tragedy and disaster which includes experiences which have not featured in any previous such account.

Author : Eric Richards
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000081613
Total Pages : 435 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A History of the Highland Clearances written by Eric Richards and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-05 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1982, A History of the Highland Clearances looks at the forcible clearance of tenants from land they had farmed for centuries by landlords in the Highlands of Scotland in the early nineteenth century. It examines the general context of historical change, provides a full narrative of the clearances and offers a critical evaluation of the documentary sources upon which the entire story depends. By placing his subject in its historical perspective and into the context of the rest of Britain and Europe, Eric Richards vividly illustrates the realities of the Highland experience in the age of the clearances.

Author : Kathleen Fidler
Publisher : Floris Books
ISBN 13 : 1782500901
Total Pages : 113 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Desperate Journey written by Kathleen Fidler and published by Floris Books. This book was released on 2014-03-20 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twins Kirsty and David Murray are forced to leave their crofting home in the north of Scotland, and struggle to cope with life in Glasgow, where the work is hard and dangerous. Then comes a chance for a new adventure on a ship bound for Canada. Will they survive the treacherous Atlantic crossing, and what will they find in the strange new land? The Desperate Journey is Kathleen Fidler's best-known story, a true Scottish classic whose thrilling plot will keep children gripped till the end.

Author : Ken McGoogan
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 1443452610
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Flight of the Highlanders written by Ken McGoogan and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author Ken McGoogan tells the story of those courageous Scots who, ruthlessly evicted from their ancestral homelands, were sent to Canada in coffin ships, where they would battle hardship, hunger and even murderous persecution. After the Scottish Highlanders were decimated at the 1746 Battle of Culloden, the British government banned kilts and bagpipes and set out to destroy a clan system that for centuries had sustained a culture, a language and a unique way of life. The Clearances, or forcible evictions, began when landlords—among them traitorous clan chieftains—realized they could increase their incomes dramatically by driving out tenant farmers and dedicating their estates to sheep. Flight of the Highlanders: The Making of Canada intertwines two main narratives. The first is that of the Clearances themselves, during which some 200,000 Highlanders were driven—some of them burned out, others beaten unconscious—from lands occupied by their forefathers for hundreds of years. The second narrative focuses on resettlement. The refugees, frequently misled by false promises, battled impossible conditions wherever they arrived, from the forests of Nova Scotia to the winter barrens of northern Manitoba. Between the 1770s and the 1880s, tens of thousands of dispossessed and destitute Highlanders crossed the Atlantic —prototypes for the refugees we see arriving today from around the world. If today Canada is more welcoming to newcomers than most countries, it is at least partly because of the lingering influence of those unbreakable refugees. Together with their better-off brethren—the lawyers, educators, politicians and businessmen—those indomitable Highlanders were the making of Canada.

Author : Neil M. Gunn
Publisher : Souvenir Press
ISBN 13 : 0285640038
Total Pages : 351 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Butcher's Broom written by Neil M. Gunn and published by Souvenir Press. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Butcher's Broom is one of Gunn's epic recreations of a key period in Scottish history, the Highland clearances of the nineteenth century. Gunn captures the spirit of Highland culture, the sense of community and tradition, in a manner that speaks to our own time. At the centre of the novel is Dark Mairi who embodies what is most vital and lasting in mankind, whose values encapsulate what was lost in Scotland to make way for progress while her land was cleared to make way for wintering sheep. The weaving of traditional ballads with the lives of Gunn's characters evokes the community that must be destroyed. Elie lost among strangers with her fatherless child while Seonaid defies the invaders, fighting them from the roof of her croft. This is among the most moving of Gunn's works and establishes the belief in a transcendent spirituality that would be so dominant in his later work.

Author : Alwyn Edgar
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781838275037
Total Pages : 742 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Clans and Clearance written by Alwyn Edgar and published by . This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 742 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you go to the Scottish Highlands now, you will find many valleys almost without people. Yet we know from history and archaeology that many people lived in the Highlands for thousands of years. What happened? Between about 1740 and 1900, the Highland landlords decided to clear out the people, and establish great sheep farms instead. Five volumes will tell the story, starting with volume one - "Clans and Clearance". In Highland histories, some beliefs (though clearly at odds with the evidence) re-appear regularly, all these, and other, misapprehensions are dealt with in "Clans and Clearance" e.g- * There was an enormous Highland population increase in the century after 1750: this never happened - the highest possible increase is 37% in the years 1750-1840 - during which time food production doubled or trebled.*. Some figures in original documents are clearly inaccurate, but have been accepted by writers who feel that documents cannot lie; they claim that Highland parishes averaged 400 square miles. This is clearly wrong, and can be disproved by anyone who has an atlas and a ruler: the average was about 100 square miles. * The clearances were carried out by "the English". In reality they were carried out by the clan chiefs, after the Lowlanders and the English conquered the Highlands, following the Battle of Culloden, 1746. The British state forced the private-property system on to the Highlanders; the clan chiefs were made into landowners, who suddenly realized they could make themselves rich by driving out the clansfolk and letting the land to large farmers. * Most of the Highlanders were Catholics. In fact 96% of the Highlanders were Protestant. * The old Highlanders were "crofters". In fact the Highlanders were hunter-gatherers, with a second ample food source in their vast flocks and herds. The crofters appeared only after the clearances, when some of the evicted were kindly allowed to try growing potatoes in an acre of two of barren, waste ground. * The clan chiefs were tyrants, jailing and executing clansfolk indiscriminately. No, the chiefs had no state apparatus - police, soldiers, lawyers, courts, jails, torturers, executioners etc - so had to rule with the general approval of the clansfolk. * The Highlanders' cattle lived under the same roof as the Highlanders . No, the herds far too large; this only happened after the clearances, when Herds no longer had enough pasture for their great flocks, and therefore had very few animals left - and very little grazing, so the cow had to be housed in the same building. * The clansfolk were wildly licentious, drinking enormous quantities of whisky, while at the same time they fervently believed in a strait-laced religion. No, both these opposite convulsions appeared as extreme reactions to the social misery caused by the clearances.