Devine - The Scottish Clearances a history of the dispossessed, 1600-1900

T. M. Devine

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THE SCOTTISH CLEARANCES

A History of the Dispossessed 16001900

T. M. Devine has written four books for Penguin: The Scottish Nation, Scotlands Empire, To the Ends of the Earth and Independence or Union. He is Sir William Fraser Professor Emeritus of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh. In 2001 he was awarded the Royal Gold Medal, Scotlands supreme academic accolade, and has won all three major prizes for Scottish historical research. He was knighted in 2014 for services to the study of Scottish history. In 2018 he received the UK Parliaments All Party History and Archives Group Lifetime Achievement Award for Historical Studies.

A Daily Telegraph, Herald and Scotsman Book of the Year 2018

Scotlands best modern historian he make history accessible backed up with formidable original research a balanced, detailed and extremely readable account of one of the saddest events in Scotlands history Ewen MacAskill, Guardian

It is his magnum opus also provides a final and exquisite stitching underpinning the tapestry woven through his other great Scottish histories: To the Ends of the Earth, Scotlands Empire and Independence or Union Kevin McKenna, The Herald

Devine treats the subject with sensitive intelligence in providing us with the material which makes it more possible to see history as it actually was, Sir Tom has written a necessary book Allan Massie, Scotsman

In this powerful book Devine lays out the history with admirable lucidity and comprehensive depth The processes of dispossession related in this important book continue to mark contemporary Scotland. The emptiness of the countryside, north and south, is marketed as a natural and positive state of affairs. Solitude and wilderness are valuable commodities today. Tom Devine lays out, in comprehensive depth, the traumatic process that created these conditions Ewen Cameron, Irish Times

In a meticulously detailed history Devine sets the record straight there are some notable myth-busting moments and a lot to admire in this book Stuart Kelly, Spectator

A giant of Scottish intellectual life, Professor Sir Tom Devine is always a clear eyed guide to the countrys history this book is a history which still matters The Herald

Devines book should be in every Scottish library, private as well as public. He is a master expert in moulding the morass of new historiographic material into a digestible whole. He writes with admirable clarity, sticking closely to verifiable information, with two audiences in mind, one his peers in universities, the other the reading public Alan Taylor, Scottish Review of Books

This book is very much in the Devine mould: eloquent, erudite and comprehensive his usual trenchant style is also on display. These features will ensure its relevance to Scottish historical studies for some considerable time to come D. S. Forsyth, Literary Review

So much British History is London-centric but T.M. Devine, probably the foremost historian of Scotland, challenges that Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph, 50 Books that Blew Us Away 2018

Likely to represent the definitive word for at least an academic generation on this most controversial of topics in Scottish history The National

Sir Tom Devine has swept away much of the misunderstanding but has not deadened the story. What he tells is in many respects even more dramatic Brian Morton, The Herald

A massively researched work Magnus Linklater, The Times Scotland

Scotlands most important current historian When it comes to the Clearances, Devine is again an exhilarating puncturer of myths and resolver of mysteries. Devine is rigorous, factual, endlessly curious and unafraid to draw big conclusions. He has made a superb book. It is crammed with data but is colourful and passionate as well. Anyone interested in Scottish history needs to read it it is also a great contribution to British history Andrew Marr, Sunday Times

A great historian punctuates a national myth. This superb book is written by a member of the Scottish intellectual aristocracy (Tom Devine is a knight as well as a professor) which renders its conclusions almost unassailable. This is a life work what is obvious is that the book is massively researched David Aaronovitch, The Times

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First published by Allen Lane 2018
Published in Penguin Books 2019

Copyright T. M. Devine, 2018

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover photograph: Crofting Family Cutting Peat by James Valentine (18151880)/Bridgeman Images

ISBN: 978-0-141-98594-7

In memory of

Malcolm Gray

19182008

Historian of Scottish rural society

Few things cry so urgently for rewriting as does Scots history, as in few aspects of her bastardised culture has Scotland been so ill-served as by her historians.

The chatter and gossip of half the salons and drawing-rooms of European intellectualism hang over the antique Scottish scene like a malarial fog through which peer the fictitious faces of heroic Highlanders, hardy Norsemen, lovely Stewart queens, and dashing Jacobite rebels.

Those stage-ghosts shamble amid the dimness, and mope and mow in their ancient parts with an idiotic vacuity but a maddening persistence.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish Scene or The Intelligent Mans Guide to Albyn (1934)

The Highland Clearances as Holocaust: Excerpts from Popular Histories, 19742000

Tenant Structure on Four Lowland Estates, 16751824

Summonses and Decreets of Removal: Selected Lowland Sheriff Courts, 16621800

Estimated Net Out-Migration from Ayr, Angus, Fife, Lanarkshire, 17551790s

Summons of Removing, Sutherland, 1810

. Cottar structure in a Fife fermetoun, 1714

. Number of sheep driven across the Border to England, 166591

. Population of selected east and central Border parishes, 1755 and 1790s

. Number of cattle driven across the Border to England, 166591

. Tenant numbers on eleven Lowland estates, 17351850

. Summonses of Removal, Hamilton sheriff court, 176384 (available years)

. Parishes gaining and losing population in the counties of Angus, Fife, Lanarkshire and Ayrshire, 1790s

. New and extended settlements, villages and towns in four Scottish Lowland counties, 1790s

. Intended improvements on the estate of the Earl of Eglinton in Ayrshire, 1771

. References to improvements on Richard A. Oswalds possessions in Ayrshire, 1803

. Men employed in enclosing and planting Hamilton estates, Lanarkshire lands, March 1774

. Life histories of six cottars, Monthrive, Fife, 1758

. The population of South Ross of Mull in mid-century: the effects of clearance

. Summonses of Removal as proportion of number of households, parish of Barvas (Lewis), 184853