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.

Badenoch today is a landscape of empty glens and ruined settlements, but it was not always so. This book examines the transformative events that shaped the region's destiny: climate and market forces, hunger and relief measures, sheep farms and sporting estates, agricultural improvement and proprietorial greed, and the evolution of clanship. Although this is an intensely localised study, the dramatic nature of change is explored against the wider context of events not just across the Highlands, but also within the British state and its global empire. Badenoch's journey moves from the relative prosperity of the Napoleonic Wars into the terrible post-war destitution that devastated peasant, tacksman and Duke of Gordon alike. Estate reform and 'improvement' gradually brought a degree of economic and social stability, but inevitably resulted in depopulation as people were forced off the land to seek refuge in the impoverished 'planned villages' or to abandon their Gaelic homeland for life in the Lowlands. For those with the means, however, emigration provided lucrative opportunities unimaginable at home. Through extensive use of documentary evidence, much of it previously unseen, David Taylor paints an intimate portrait of the historically neglected region of Badenoch – one that provides a compelling new perspective on Highland history.