A remarkable new analysis of the shameful Highland clearances through the experience and effective defiance of one man.

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

In the late eighteenth century, Scottish emigration became an unstoppable force. Campey examines the causes of the exodus and traces the colonizers progress across Canada.

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.

The Highland Clearances stands out as one of the most emotive chapters in the history of Scotland. This book traces the origins of the Clearances from the eighteenth century to their culmination in the crofting legislation of the 1880s. In considering both the terrible suffering of the Highland people as well as the stark choices that faced landowners during a period of rapid economic change, it shows how the Clearances were one of many 'attempted' solutions to the problem of how to maintain a population on marginal and infertile land, and were, in fact, part of a wider European movement of rural depopulation. In drawing attention away from the mythology to the hard facts of what actually happened, The Highland Clearances offers a balanced analysis of events which created a terrible scar on the Highland and Gaelic imagination.

First published in 1985, A History of the Highland Clearances: Volume 2 explores the various types of communal and intellectual responses, contemporary and retrospective, to the experience of the clearances. The first section considers the legacy of the two hundred years’ debate about the Highland problem and the place of the clearances therein. The second section assesses the scale, range and timing of the emigrations of the Highlanders, as well as some of the motivations. The third section contemplates the direct popular response to the clearances, the collective memory and the tradition of physical resistance. The fourth section is about the career, trial and reputation of Patrick Sellar, which together embodied much of the social history, ruling ideas, and the necessary mythology of the clearances. The final section considers the fundamental economic problem of the Highlands in the age of the clearances, and the moral and economic alternatives that faced the community, the landlords, and the nation.

Winner of the Saltire Society Scottish History Book of the Year AwardIn April 1816 Patrick Sellar was brought to trial in Inverness for culpable homicide for his treatment of the Highlanders of Strathnaver, the most northerly part of the Scottish highlands. In the process of evicting them from their ancient lands he had allegedly burnt houses, destroyed mills and wrecked pastures. There is perhaps no more hated nor reviled individual in Highland history. This outstanding new book, however, gives a balanced assessment of the man, a vivid account of a terrible episode in Highland history, and a riveting narration of a tormented life. Richard's book is an account of Sellar's life and times: that he was ruthless, avaricious, devious and cruel is beyond question. But his letters suggest a streak of idealism: did he really believe that the displaced highlanders would be better off, better fed, educated and housed in their new homes? Have the Highlands in the end become more productive and prosperous? In the course of his fast-moving and gripping account, Eric Richards looks carefully at these vexed questions.

In this work, Bruce and Scott have compiled a selection of Scottish letters covering eight centuries and involving many of the great historical, literary and political figures in Scotland's past.