A detailed and dramatic account of about 100 years of Highland Clearances. The book covers them by both date and region. It mentions many of the main characters, (who are mostly landlords and their agents as there were very few notable people who raised their voice against the clearances; it was mostly the little nameless people who fought their own evictions). There is some attention to the economic background of the Clearances and the changing situation of the large clan chiefs/landowners, but by and large the landowners, both Scottish and English, are portrayed as greedy and heartless - which is a fair portrayal when you start considering the details and human experience of the Clearances.
This book raises some interesting larger issues.
First, the Clearances seem to have occurred right at a time when modern capitalism was taking shape in England. One of the important ground rules was around ownership of resources whatever they might be. The owner of a property was free to do what he pleased with it, regardless of its effect on society at large and those immediately around him. I suspect this is the first naked formulation of man as a stand-alone being, separate and independent of the social context in which he lives. He is neither owed nothing nor owes anything - except of course as dictated by the Law, which you clearly see here gamed for the owners benefit. An excellent example of how Law and morality, or even human decency, can be diametrically opposed to each other.
Interestingly, one of the critics of the Clearances at the time was Swiss, and he noted how the legal system in Switzerland would never allow such rampant disregard for social fall-out by owners and holders of large capital. Their legal system recognized some kind of mutual relationship between peasants and landowners.
You also see the ancient link between organized religion and power, with local ministers and priests preaching submission to the Law above all even in the face of their personal experience of the misery the Clearances caused. But this is an old story common to many cultures.
I wonder if you can also see this Clearance experience as a first trial run of colonialism that later spread throughout the British Empire and other European powers' holding. Perhaps Ireland was even earlier - I will have to read up on it. The Clearances as a model. If this is the case, then you can see what a strong influence early English capitalism had on shaping the western capitalist model that has dominated.
There is also the issue of clashes of world views. The Highlands lived in a premodern capitalist society where the main cultural values were family and clan reputation, relationship with the ancestral land, and a net of stories and histories in which the present nestles (not to say that people actually lived that way - this was life's backdrop, backstage scenery against which life was played). After Culloden, the Scottish nobility encountered an English elite where money, wealth and consumption had already become the paramount social values, and where the earlier worldview had become a source for romantic dreaming and fantasy escapism (ie. Sir Walter Scott).
Also to note that the Highland people were essentially a mountain people and in some ways there struggle is similar to what has gone on, and still goes on, in the Caucasus with those mountain peoples. The Caucasus people have also maintained forgotten or marginalized languages, and kept those values of a tribal warrior society - valour, honour, attachment to the land.
Another interesting question - how historical, place-centred, story driven identity is transformed into a personal mythology that functions as a form of entertainment and self-aggrandizement grafted onto an essentially consumerist, essentially hollow personal identity that has no awareness of the past and dreams only of future riches and material goods.
Interesting quote:
"The Highlander's soul lives in the clan and family traditions of the past, the legends of the ingle, the songs of the bards. The master-idea of the English mind - the idea of Business - has not dawned on this soul, has not developed its peculiar virtues in his character. He is loyal but not punctual, honest but not systematic. The iron genius of economical improvements he know not and heeds not."
- from John Roberston, journalist, 1840s
This concept of economic improvement, increasing the value of the land and its products but with total disregard for the people who actually live on the land - rather like GDP growth and its relation to eating and paying ones bills; the two are not necessarily related. Depends on who's at the receiving end of the "improvements".
Another peculiar parallel is to the way the Native People were treated in Canada and the U.S. Their land was considered unused and, though communally held, seen as owned by no one. They were cleared from their land and left in squalid conditions. They too came from culture and worldview that was considered worthless, inferior and in need of 'improvement". The real irony is that the Scottish immigrants (among others) essentially reenacted the Clearances but now as the new landlords.
The same parallels exist to the Palestinian/Israeli situation.
What if this is a trope of history, or at least modern history in the capitalist era? When capitalism and consumerism meet older societies and cultural groups with historical, less material values, the older society is destined to be marginalized, vilified, dispossessed and dispersed or destroyed (and then romanticized, as what has happened to Native and Highland culture - OK, the Israelis have a way to go here...).
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