Stuart Kelly

Relocate or emigrate

In a meticulously detailed history, T.M. Devine sets the record straight. But the drama is lost in a welter of statistics

There is a degree of irony in the opening chapter of T.M. Devine’s history, lambasting popular previous depictions of the Clearances and citing ludicrous comparisons to Nazi genocide and the misty-eyed melancholy of John Prebble. Though it does not mention such iconography as Thomas Faed’s painting ‘Last of the Clans’, used for the paperback of Prebble’s book, or Erskine Nicol’s ‘An Ejected Family’ in all its schmaltzy Victorian glory, such depictions are clearly the target. Yet the book itself is called The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed and not, which would actually be more accurate, ‘Patterns of Land Ownership, Agricultural Change as well as Internal and External Migrations in Scotland, 1600–1900’. Not such a grabby title.

Devine, as a historian, is meticulous if not always enthralling. There is an air of the Harold Wilson era about this book. With white-hot research, lots of carefully calibrated tables and perhaps the occasional use of a slide rule and logarithm book, the Truth can be established. I may never need to know again that the average price for meal imported from the Clyde to the Outer Hebrides went from £2.2s per boll to 16s per boll between 1840 and 1880, or that the cattle herd in Sutherland, between 1790 and 1808, fell from 5,140 to 2,906 while sheep numbers rose from 7,840 to 21,000 (a suspiciously round number). Facts may be chiels that winna ding an downa be disputed, but interpretations of data certainly are. Yet buried under the statistical chest-puffing there is a lot to admire in this book.

For a start, there is closer attention paid to the south of Scotland as well as the Highlands. Whether the forms of expropriation of property are commensurate I will leave for the reader to decide: all I will say is that moving from a subsistence existence as a cottar to being a shoemaker in the local town is rather different from having your house burnt down and being forcibly deported to Nova Scotia.

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