Introduction
Beyond the Battle of Culloden and the bitter and brutal repression of Jacobitism that followed, and before a muscular, widespread opposition to clearances began to be manifest in the late nineteenth century, the Highlands and Islands have typically been portrayed as a quiet place. If, as T. C. Smout famously put it, the Scottish people were of ‘uninflammable character’, the Highland Gael proved, so this line of argument goes, especially quiescent and orderly.Footnote 1 What truth is there in this assertion? The pioneering work of Eric Richards and James Hunter has shown that this supposed quietude was occasionally broken by dramatic, one-off protests, these driven by issues of possession of, and access, to land.Footnote 2 This has been allied to a particular focus on disturbances in the crofting counties of the north-west of the region and the paradigmatic land raid, especially from the 1880s. Different protest forms – and in different times – have tended to be relegated to little more than a byline. These characterizations of protest unite an otherwise fragmented historiographical landscape across the ‘people’s historians’, who have framed protest as a class struggle between landlords and tenants, and ‘economic historians’ stressing the importance of rapidly deteriorating socio-economic conditions caused by the introduction of agrarian capitalism.Footnote 3
This paper offers a critical analysis of this work on the post-1750 Highlands and Islands. In so doing, it also seeks to offer alternative understandings as to how we might think differently about how the people of the Highlands challenged their situation. It starts from a premise that has proved to be influential in the revival and reconceptualization of work over the past two decades on protest in rural England and the Highland Famine and later land wars – this so-called ‘New Protest History’ – : to write protest, whenever and wherever it is found, through just one lens, form and scale makes for a partial analysis.Footnote 4 So is the case for histories of protest in the Highlands and Islands for the period after 1750. As noted, hitherto, studies have almost exclusively focused on dramatic, large-scale events driven by issues of possession of and access to land in the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the land raids of the 1880s.
This reading is based on some historically rooted Scottish geographical and cultural peculiarities. Divides between ‘Highland’ and ‘Lowland’ and ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ have shaped discussions of resistance and compounded geographical and historiographical divides. Thus, whilst the most important and comprehensive examination of Scottish protest in the eighteenth century has come from Christopher Whatley, it has a primary focus on the urbanised Lowlands.Footnote 5 The rural Lowlands and North East Scotland, although experiencing similar if less dramatic socio-economic transformation have arguably suffered a worst fate than the Highlands and Islands, with Lowlanders portrayed as quiescent victims of a ‘silent revolution’.Footnote 6 By contrast, writing the Highland past has been shaped by the place of the Highlands – both figuratively and metaphorically – in the history of Scotland, resting on the idea that the region’s development was distinct both culturally and economically from the rest of the country. Perpetually acted upon and set apart from the more urbanised, industrialised, and politicised Lowland core, with protest mythologised, perhaps even sanctified, as analogous with the disappearance of clanship or the traumatic history of the clearances.Footnote 7 Indeed, Eric Richards even went as far as to assert that there was a distinctive form of ‘Highland resistance’. And whilst beyond the work of Iain Grigor this particular phrase has not assumed a wider use, the inference in Richards’ phrase – that protest in the Highlands was distinctive by dint of the relative lack of it and its focus on occasional, dramatic land-based episodes – endures in generalist histories of the Highlands.Footnote 8 As we go on to show, however, Richards’ own work did occasionally considered other manifestations of protest – including his nuanced reading of migration as resistance –whilst his insistence on the distinctiveness of protest in the Highlands for the period from the 1840s has recently been called into question.Footnote 9
The conceptual focus in Highland historiography on collective action driven by clearances has created a timeline of the resort to protest between 1750 and 1886. This has been further enshrined by the paucity of research on protest during the ‘first phase of clearance’ (1750–1820) of those who worked the land consequent upon the irremediable transition to capitalistic forms of land management.Footnote 10 Indeed, even in the work of Richards that promised a reassessment of protest in the region before 1880 or Kenneth Logue’s Popular Disturbances, the only overview of the resort to protest in Scotland for the period, the pre-1780 period was almost entirely ignored.Footnote 11 What literature there is sees the period of the aftermath of the Jacobite rising as the transition from organised warfare to occasional, localised outbreaks of riotous opposition. If Jacobite networks – and the memory of the suppression of the rising – informed aspects of opposition to the state, resistance was ultimately characterised by short-lived forms of banditry repurposing clan practices but disappearing by c.1760.Footnote 12
The quick succession of the Jacobite risings, militarized state intervention, and cultural disorientation occasioned by the betrayal of their former clan chiefs, had, so the story goes, demoralised the Highlander and provided, as Richards put it, a ‘spectacle of a peasantry on the retreat’.Footnote 13 The focus of the literature has otherwise been on landed proprietors’ adoption of capitalistic forms of land management and their transition, to borrow Robert Dodgshon’s telling phrase, ‘from chiefs to landlords’.Footnote 14 In this interpretation, the unrestrained power of the landowning classes, the nation’s ‘civic leadership’, left little room, figuratively and literally, for protest, leaving populations to vote with their feet by seeking better lives overseas.Footnote 15 With the exception of episodic protest or extraordinary action such the 1792 Bliadhna na Caorach (‘Year of the Sheep’), Highlanders and Islanders were either unable or unwilling to mount opposition to the new commercial and governmental order. After 1820, further clearance and the famine of the 1840s and 1850s limited threats to the social order by weakening communities. Consequently, for Tom Devine and James Hunter, the Highland Famine generated no meaningful protest: for a defeated people with no bargaining power, open protest was simply out the question.Footnote 16 Only in the 1870s and 1880s did Highlanders and Islanders graduate their tactics to full-blown land invasion with land disturbances persisting until well into the twentieth century. Thus, a genealogy of Highland resistance was created, culminating, perhaps, with legislation in the shape of the 1886 Crofters Holdings Act and then 1919 Land Settlement Act, which represented victories for the vindicated crofter.Footnote 17
This genealogy and set of interpretations are open to question, for instance in the important work on cultural and literary protest, especially that on Gaelic poetry during the clearance era.Footnote 18 More recently, this concern with the evolution of Gaelic protest poetry and ideology has been strongly developed by Ryan Dziadowiec.Footnote 19 Further, David Taylor’s work has offered a geographical shift by investigating attitudes to commercialism and agrarian improvement ‘on the ground’ and across the social ladder in Badenoch.Footnote 20 Other perspectives, moreover, derive from the fields of gender studies, animal studies, and historical geography.Footnote 21
There remains much to be done, however. Understandings of events of protest and resistance after 1750 would, for instance, benefit from a much closer alignment with the conceptual and analytical developments that have proved so important in the England-centric ‘New Protest History’.Footnote 22 These offer clear evidence of the benefits of abandoning a reliance on old shibboleths such as class, or the distinction between ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ protest, to instead also embrace the importance of – amongst other things – ecology, landscape, sexuality, and materiality.Footnote 23 The Highlands and Islands historiography has paid limited attention to such developments with, for instance, the near-absence of research on ‘everyday resistance’ on the model proposed by James Scott looming large.Footnote 24 This paper, then, aims to encourage the adoption of a broader definition of resistance, including acts of protest, acquisitive acts – from ‘social crimes’, the theft of things that plebeian communities did not view as being criminal, to the defiance in an impoverished person taking grain from a wealthy farmer – as well as other practices and utterances which are not necessarily intended to be read or have a target.Footnote 25
A critical analysis of the field, accompanied by suggestions of future directions, thus appears both timely and necessary, all the more so, as Martin MacGregor recently noted, as Scottish studies is not blessed with an abundance of historiographical overviews.Footnote 26 The first section places Highland protest historiography in a national context by returning to the seminal texts on Scottish protest starting with the assumption that rural Scots resisted less than their European counterparts and when they did so, they resorted to short-lived crowd action. The second section turns to the literature on the Highlands and Islands, which has characterised protest in the region as nearly exclusively large-scale, dramatic, and set apart from the rest of Scotland. The last section offers some reflections on future research agendas, focusing on the importance of everyday resistance and local environments of protest and the existence of alternative protest repertoires and mechanisms beyond that of protest against clearance.
The crowd in Scottish protest studies
A genealogy of Scottish protest must begin with Smout’s oft-quoted assertion that opens this paper: that the Scottish people were of ‘uninflammable character’, a term which became the linchpin of calls to revisit Scottish protest studies.Footnote 27 To explain Scottish rural workers’ passivity in an age of economic upheaval, Smout turned to William Cobbett’s account of his 1830 visit to the Lothians where he observed with some surprise that, while ricks were burnt and machinery destroyed on English farms, Scots remained quiescent and orderly.Footnote 28 This was a perception only exacerbated by well-established portrayals of Scotland as a land of insurrection and its people as brutish and violent.Footnote 29 With religious and political conflicts in the seventeenth century, the Jacobite risings of 1689, 1715, and 1745, and the radicalism of the 1820s all presenting serious threats to the social order, the supposed entrenched lawlessness and backwardness of Scots should have logically engulfed the nation in protest.Footnote 30 The absence of a Scottish Swing, for instance, appeared an eccentricity.
Smout was not alone in his characterisation, which was widely shared by a generation of economic and social historians long after the publication of Smout’s 1969 volume. Where Smout led, explanation followed. For Eric Hobsbawm, Scottish rural workers could not resist dispossession for reasons both ‘complex’ and ‘unclear’, leaving the country’s transition to a pioneering land of capitalist development unchecked.Footnote 31 In the previously pacified rural Lowlands, when protest did occur it was seen as atypical and short-lived, the brutal repression of the Levellers’ Revolt of 1723–4 seemingly the cause of this absence.Footnote 32 Further, the buoyancy of agricultural and industrial labour markets in planned villages, burghs, and large towns, rising wages, and a comparatively modest population rise had, it was suggested, protected Lowland communities from the total deterioration of their standards of living.Footnote 33 Thus, for Houston and Whyte, eighteenth century Scotland was a ‘relatively orderly, authoritarian society’ with lower levels of unrest than elsewhere.Footnote 34 The root cause of which, according to Smout, could be found in rural Calvinism. He suggested that to protest or revolt seemed pointless as rewards for a hardscrabble existence ‘would come in God’s good time, and if there was to be vengeance that would come in God’s good time too’.Footnote 35 This interpretation has proved enduring, perhaps reinforced by comparisons with the rest of Britain. While the Irish organised large-scale and co-ordinated action and the English took to the law courts, Scots have thus appeared tamed, deferential to their landlords, and even submissive.Footnote 36
There were, however, challenges to this ‘orthodoxy of passivity’ model as early as the 1970s and 1980s. These responses were inspired by the work of Charles Tilly and George Rudé and tended to focus on collective action and the history of the crowd. It is telling that Logue’s pioneering Popular Disturbances in Scotland, 1780–1815 focused exclusively on ‘popular direct action in the form of crowd disturbances’, i.e. the riot. Logue even went as far as to say that ‘industrial action belongs in a detailed study of the beginnings of trade union organisation rather than in a work on popular disturbances’.Footnote 37 If such acts of classificatory purification are, on one level, understandable – any study has to start with a conceptual framework and stick to it – on another level, Logue’s framework is frustratingly limiting. Subsequent studies have, with few exceptions, remained wedded to the crowd as the expression of popular protest, as the form of resistance. This, in many ways, reflects not just the broader historiographical trends beyond Scotland – the pioneering works of the largely England-centric ‘history from below’ movement focused on the crowd and the collective – but also the nature of the archive.Footnote 38 Riots make for lively copy and were more likely to be recorded than clandestine and covert acts.Footnote 39 Moreover, at certain times in England newspapers were under pressure not to report incendiary fires for fear of promoting copycat actions.Footnote 40 And yet, as a close reading of Logue’s study shows, crowd actions often went hand in hand with other forms of protest: threats; the sending of incendiary letters; attacks on property; incendiarism, and so on.Footnote 41 The second most comprehensive rebuttal of Scottish passivity before 1800, a 1990 volume suggestively entitled Conflict and Stability in Scotland, contested the idea that Scottish protest was ‘isolated, sporadic, futile and unrepresentative’ but largely focused on collective action and almost entirely neglected the Highlands and Islands.Footnote 42
In relation to typologies of collective action, the focus has settled on four major themes: resistance to clearance; religious protest; militia and food riots; and supposedly ‘political disturbances’. The focus on particular dates has been, moreover, driven by the timing of especially dramatic moments of collective action. One such has been the militia riots of 1797 that spread through much of Lowland Scotland and parts of the Highlands.Footnote 43 Another Bliadhna na Caorach (‘Year of the Sheep’) of 1792 in Strathrusdale, the organised opposition against Sutherland factor Patrick Sellar’s clearance of Strathnaver in 1812–4, followed by the ‘Dudgeonite agitation’ in Easter Ross in 1819–20.Footnote 44 The wider period was punctuated by food rioting in 1795–6, 1800–01, 1813, and 1847, which are another Scottish particularity: sporadic as opposed to endemic as in the rest of Europe.Footnote 45 Most dramatic of all was the ‘Radical War’ (aka the ‘Scottish Insurrection’) of 1820, which largely, if not exclusively, played out in the major Lowland urban centres.Footnote 46 Of course, such landmark moments of protest are of critical importance, they are, after all, visible by dint of the threat to order they posed and the scale of opposition offered. Indeed, it is telling that a recent themed section of Studies in Scottish Literature contained eight papers on the theme of ‘Insurrections in Scottish Literature’ rather than ‘the crowd’, ‘protest’, or ‘resistance’.Footnote 47 Further, Member of the Scottish Parliament Kenny MacAskill’s 2020 popular book Radical Scotland examines threats to the status quo (and public order) from the 1790s to the Radical War, the actions of ‘radical’ crowds the focus.Footnote 48
This dual focus has had several consequences. First, there is a sense that certain forms of collective action are almost expected in certain places but not in others: the radical riot in Edinburgh and Glasgow (and occasionally Paisley and Perth); industrial disturbances in the Clyde Valley; the food riot in small(er) coastal towns; collective action against eviction and dispossession in the Highlands and Islands. An important exception is religious protest, which Callum Brown found virtually ‘everywhere’ in Scotland between 1730 and 1860.Footnote 49 Second, this identification with specific regions and locales with a particular crowd action has acted to shade out work on other forms of less celebrated (and perhaps less archivally visible) forms of crowd action. Thus, Logue’s Popular Disturbances contains a chapter somewhat dismissively entitled ‘Some other disturbances’, which unconvincingly draws together a series of more-or-less discrete protests that could not ‘conveniently compartmentalised’ in his foregoing schema.Footnote 50 There is, moreover, a sense that the infamy of the Edinburgh ‘mob’ – memorialised by Walter Scott in The Heart of Midlothian and reported by Daniel Defoe to be ‘the worst of its kind’ – not only shadows other understandings of the resort to protest but accounts of other places too.Footnote 51
By way of contrast, Christopher Whatley has recently asserted that:
In smaller places, there were many more similar demonstrations that only with the benefit of hindsight can we see amounted to an ongoing nation-wide, class-based issue … The commercialisation of common land (or commonties) within or on the boundaries of the burghs was not infrequently met with resistance …The change of use … carried out in the name of improvement—the ideology that underpinned so much economic, social and cultural change in eighteenth century Scotland and the process by which customary rights and usages were ridden over roughshod…Footnote 52
But against such a suggestive assertion, these acts of collective opposition – let alone other more covert, everyday forms of resistance – to forms of enclosure and improvement await systematic analysis. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the body of work examining resistance to the clearances.
From clearance to protest?
Examinations of collective resistance to the clearances are arguably the most developed and sustained body of work in Scottish protest studies, Annie Tindley noting in her important recent review of the historiography of the clearances that this has ‘long been a focus for historians’.Footnote 53 The two dominant works in this field Richards’ A History of the Highland Clearances and Hunter’s The Making of the Crofting Community are now forty and fifty years old, respectively, with both largely confining their analyses to the dramatic, landmark moments of opposition.Footnote 54
Pointing to the ‘long tradition, indeed the continuum, of popular Highland protest’, Richards drew attention to over forty instances of, as he saw it, spontaneous resistance to law and order between 1777 and 1854, which, by the time of the publication of his Debating the Highland Clearances, had grown to fifty in number. These instances were largely confined to the later nineteenth century, with only two events reported before 1790 and the vast majority taking place in the 1840s.Footnote 55 Like Logue, Richards was influenced by Rudé and Tilly and his principal concern was with categorisation and typologies, with events separated into three types of disturbances: induction protest, food riots, and clearance protest, the latter by and large the preponderant mode of opposition. From this, a four-stage pattern was created that, according to Richards, typified the ‘“classic” form of Highland protest behaviour’ in reaction to clearance.Footnote 56 After several attempts to serve summons of removal, the law officer or factor would be met with humiliation or be chased away by township residents. The intervention of constables would then be faced with collective assault, often spearheaded by women and children. After an appeal by the landowner to higher legal authorities, threats of military intervention surfaced. Such rumours, compounded by the mediation of the local minister, caused resistance to collapse. In almost every case, protest was ineffectual in preventing clearance.Footnote 57 Richards concluded that Highland protest was ‘inchoate, dispersed, unarmed, apolitical and rural based’ and largely confined to opposition to clearance.Footnote 58
Richards did make some efforts to understand protest beyond large scale and collective action, for instance in his perceptive analysis of emigration as, initially, an act of protest against the transformation of landholding structures and then as an alternative to clearance as demographic pressures increased in the age of Malthus.Footnote 59 Subsequently, McLean, Hunter, and Kehoe have drawn attention to the agency and adaptability of Highland tenants who emigrated en masse to North America in the second half of the eighteenth century, effectively ‘voting with their feet’.Footnote 60 Other expressions of agency, including the ties between emigration and military recruitment, have been thoroughly investigated.Footnote 61 Richards was also one of the first to allude to the role and prominence of women in social protest, and this has remained a significant point of historiographical interest.Footnote 62 More contentious has been his assertion of the complicit role of the Church with some Free Church ministers now recognised as radical advocates for the tenantry, while other scholars have shed light on the way evangelicalism was deployed to restructure cultural and social life in the midst of social and economic upheaval.Footnote 63
The existence of covert and ‘other’ forms of protest was mentioned but ultimately side-lined with the effect of reinforcing the overarching conceptual focus on crowd action. Literary protest was alluded to and, citing Cregeen’s work on Argyll, Richards observed that what he termed ‘passive resistance’ had been effectual in some places. Rural terror, chiefly in the shape of attacks on sheep farmers and their flock, was recorded both before and after the 1792 Year of the Sheep but not developed further.Footnote 64 One finds similar tentative allusions in the work of Devine and Whatley, who pointed to the existence of alternative forms of resistance in the Scottish countryside such as hostility to estate management and law enforcement, illegal wood cutting, and animal maiming.Footnote 65 But they are just that: tentative allusions to altogether different set of protest practices that point to a deeper, more entrenched resistance to agrarian change.
This lack of engagement with forms of resistance beyond short-lived collective action has been compounded by Richards’s insistence that land struggles in the late nineteenth century should be understood ‘within a long-established continuity of sporadic protest in the Highlands [our emphasis]’ thereby rendering earlier protest as not only occasional but also as mere rehearsals for the more dramatic and sustained events after 1870.Footnote 66 Only with ‘agonising gradualness’ and via the ‘growing sentimentalisation of Highland life in the social conscience of the nation’ did protest find a political expression.Footnote 67 This analysis and emphasis on continuity thus typified protest as rudimentary and suggested that successful and sustained resistance had not come within Highland society but outwith it.
Few, of course, would now agree with Richards’s statement that ‘there was a fundamental lack of a rallying ideology for the common Highlanders’.Footnote 68 Indeed, as MacGregor noted in his recent reassessment of clearance historiography, a rich literature has turned from a sole focus on social and economic factors to understand the period in ideological and cultural terms.Footnote 69 In this, the charge has undoubtedly been led by James Hunter and his 1976 The Making of the Crofting Community.Footnote 70 In both his title and opening remarks, Hunter made clear his debt to E. P. Thompson’s concept of the moral economy and his understanding of class, class consciousness, and class conflict. Crucial to Hunter’s narrative was the emphasis on a ‘crofting community’, creating a class-based master narrative opposing crofters to their profit-driven landlords. Notably, The Making did not depart from Richards’ characterisation of resistance between 1790 and c.1860, which was portrayed as ‘spontaneous and isolated acts of defiance, born out of utter desperation and condemned to failure before they began’. This depiction of a defeated peasantry, however, was to serve Hunter’s overarching narrative presenting the 1880s land wars as radical and novel, driven both from below and within an increasingly politicised crofting community fuelled by a novel expression of Presbyterian evangelicalism which influenced both Free Church adherents and its ministers.Footnote 71 Indeed, MacColl has asserted that ‘the Christian interest in land reform became a decisive factor in the success of the crofters’ campaign’, which they were able to shape along ‘moderate, “constitutional” lines’.Footnote 72
As indicated by his significant debt to Thompson, both Hunter and, to an even greater extent, Richards were willing to look beyond the immediate Highland and Island context. In his initial efforts, for instance, Richards not only built up a strong body of work around his recognition of forms of protest and resistance but was also concerned to make links with the wider protest historiography. Inspired by the pioneering work of Hobsbawm and Rudé, in 1974 Richards offered an early foray into a now-strong thread of ‘Swing studies’ – the regional/county-level focus – with a discussion of Swing ‘in the West Midlands’.Footnote 73 Logue too was keyed into and appreciated by these networks with his Popular Disturbances in Scotland being heralded by Andrew Charlesworth as ‘the long-awaited Scottish Crowd in History’.Footnote 74 Richards, moreover, made significant contributions to one of the most important works responsible for driving protest studies forward, Charlesworth’s Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain as did James Hunter.Footnote 75
After this early fruitful engagement with work in wider protest studies, subsequent research has predominantly focused on the political and cultural dimensions of protest at the regional scale. Ewen Cameron and Andrew Newby, for instance, demonstrated that the fight for the land came from within in the 1870s, as Highlanders and Islanders’ growing assertiveness found political expressions, albeit emulating contemporary events in Ireland.Footnote 76 Charles Withers culturally derived explanations suggested that protest was not restricted to the physical but also embraced the retention of Gaelic as a language of spiritual worship and literary reactions to clearance. Like Hunter, Withers viewed the clearances in Marxist terms, drawing on Gramsci’s theories of hegemony and counter-hegemony to view social relations in the region in terms of ‘the cultural dominance of one class and the means by which that class maintains its dominance’.Footnote 77
These emphases on class have proved tenacious. Indeed, in a 2000 publication suggestively titled Highland Resistance, Iain Fraser Grigor largely presented the history of protest in the region from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries as the continuous class-based opposition to landlordism.Footnote 78 As Withers noted, however, class binaries and consciousness are ultimately not sufficient to understand the way ideology often sat ‘within and between classes’ and Grigor’s account is one frustratingly lacking nuance and sensitivity to time and place.Footnote 79 Further, if Hunter’s ‘crofting community’ offers a reasonable mode of analysis for later nineteenth century protest, and there must be some doubt over this, there are even greater limitations for earlier periods. The work of Taylor in Badenoch, for instance, has brought much to our understandings of social relations in the eighteenth century, portraying protest not just as directed towards landlords but involving tacksmen and subtenants who often clashed in their aspirations for tenurial independence and agency.Footnote 80
Another thread has been that of the much, but seldom fully discussed notion of dùthchas, a paradox perhaps explained by claims such as that made by Bateman and Purser that the English language does not have the sufficiency of nouns to encompass the word’s meaning’.Footnote 81 In Anglophone Highland historiography, dùthchas has primarily been understood as a derived notion evoking hereditary rights to the land and therefore fundamentally connected to issues surrounding land tenure and custom.Footnote 82 Drawing on a mix of English and translated Gaelic language sources both Hunter and Withers saw the belief system underpinning and manifest in dùthchas as legitimising ‘from below’ acts of popular protest and source of ‘a distinctive critique of landlordism’.Footnote 83 Whilst recognising that Gaelic expressions of protest needed to be contextualised within a wider context of opposition by peasant societies, Withers further suggested that ‘individual incidents of protest shared a root cause or causes, a common ideological and practical justification borne not only out of a mutual understanding by Highlanders of their social relations one to another but also out of a unified and unifying sense of distinctiveness from other groups in society’.Footnote 84 In drawing on dùthchas in this way Withers especially, but Hunter by implication and clear intellectual sympathy, were able to understand protest as ‘the result of irreconcilable ideological differences between the moral economy of a tenantry … and the political economy of the improving classes’ for whom removal was legal right demanded by the tenets of ‘improvement’.Footnote 85 Indeed, this linking of Thompson’s formulation to Gaelic worldviews and belief system has endured, with the most recent contribution seeing ‘the Gaelic moral economy’ as ‘deriving from the Bible, kinship and a Gaelic social contract … best articulated by the panegyric code of Gaelic poetry and song’.Footnote 86
This emphasis on Gaelic poetry and oral sources has thus been crucial, particularly via the work of Donald Meek with the importance of Tuath is Tighearna being indicated by its subtitle ‘An anthology of Gaelic poetry and social and political protest’.Footnote 87 This both paved the way for an important broadening of the field and did much to dispel Sorley MacLean’s notion that Gaelic poetry had provided no answer – cultural or otherwise – to the clearances.Footnote 88 Most recently, moreover, Dziadowiec has convincingly shown that across the nineteenth century poets deployed indigenous notions of rights and belonging as forms of intellectual and political responses to dispossession. Dziadowiec has further challenged the Anglophone-based understandings of dùthchas to show that the term occupied a much wider semantic field regulating ‘social order, political allegiances, territorial belonging, possession of land, distribution of wealth, behavioural norms, personal attributes, and possibly even personal relationship to God’.Footnote 89 This centrality notwithstanding, dùthchas should, MacGregor reminds us, be embedded into a much broader ‘coherent ethical system’, which included other important influences such as Protestant evangelicalism and concepts such as kinship, charity, and hospitality.Footnote 90
Thus, where perhaps Richards’ legacy has largely been concerned with questions of periodisation and categorisation, this later historiographical shift has contributed to a geographical as well as cultural reappraisal of protest focused on the Gàidhealtachd, the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Islands. There is still work to be done, however. The ‘Gaelic moral economy’, for instance, requires further unpacking. There is the risk of replacing a monothetic explanation with another, obscuring local distinctiveness and social diversity in the process. Highlanders and Islanders were not a homogenous group, and, in the same way that class cannot explain everything, Gaelic was not a universal, unifying culture that overrode other forms of difference and experience. An emphasis on culture, identity, and ethnicity should not be taken to imply an ideological unity within Gaelic-speaking populations and, conversely, a straightforward ideological division between the ‘people’ and the landlord and factorial classes.Footnote 91 There is a clear need to properly investigate the nature of relationship between the ‘Gaelic moral economy’, to date predominantly understood as rooted in custom and rejecting commercial landlordism and agrarian capitalism, and the widespread evidence pointing to Gaels’ engagement with – and adoption of – commercial values and practices both at home and abroad, in the empire.Footnote 92 After all, the leading poet of the land wars, Màiri Mhòr nan Òran, sought to remind the people that ‘Tha beairteas fo na Cruachan/ (…)’S tha mèinnean gu ur buannachd/ An Eilean uain’ a’ Cheò’ (Wealth lies beneath those mountains/ (…) And mines to bring you profit/ In the green Island of the Mist).Footnote 93 The crux of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries land struggles was not solely a matter of how the land was used and for what purpose, but who got to reap the benefits of processes of commercialisation and privatisation. As Brown perceptively noted,
The new economic order of capitalist enterprise, and the individualistic ideology which underpinned it, could be widely accepted within proletarian and proto-proletarian ranks, leading to enthusiasm for success within it. Yet at the same time there could be protest against inconsistencies and illegalities in the emergence of that new order.Footnote 94
It is, amongst other things, to these ‘inconsistencies’ that we suggest the literature should turn next, armed with a greater understanding of the ideologies and environments that underpinned protest action.
Departures and new research avenues
Undoubtedly, one of the most blatant gaps in the historiographical treatments of protest and resistance in the Highlands and Islands, as well as Scotland as a whole, has been the limited efforts to explore protest events beyond large-scale and collective action. There are, however, signs that the tide might be turning with new research focused on gender, non-human protest actors, and protest environments emerging of late. This last section takes stock of these developments and argues for the importance of everyday resistance and local environments of protest and the existence of alternative protest repertoires and mechanisms beyond that of protest against clearance.
To date, the influence of James C. Scott’s emphasis on hidden transcripts, everyday resistance, and localities has largely bypassed Scottish protest studies, with the exceptions of the work of historical archaeologists’ Michael Given, James Symonds, and Chris Dalglish whose treatments of Highland resistance have placed more emphasis on community-driven, quotidian, and ritualistic protest expressions.Footnote 95 Other regional studies offer evidence of the potentialities of embracing a broader approach to the study of protest. We have already noted Taylor’s work on Badenoch, whilst for Argyll, Robert McGeachy detailed the numerous ways in which populations found ways to thwart ‘the people above’, including by mounting legal challenges to their authority.Footnote 96
Beyond a wariness of overarching explanatory models, the aforementioned ‘New Protest History’ approach has demonstrated the worth of thinking of protest as response to lived struggles and the dynamics of social relations in the spaces of everyday life. Protest, this approach has stressed, spoke not just to social and economic dislocations but to other senses of dispossession and loss, to landscapes that had been an anchor of identity and meaning but which were now subject to forms of making private.Footnote 97 This more holistic view foregrounds local environments as not just providing the site – the setting – for protest, but also contends that landscape as dwelt space was in itself co-constitutive of protest. Herein, the interplay between nature and culture and between humans and non-humans (plants, animals, soils, water, amongst other animate and inanimate things) informs the experience of change (whether improvement, enclosure and other forms of dispossession, and commercialisation). In this, disruptive, unsettling, dislocating, excluding change can be understood not just as an abstract sensation which in some way acts as a spur to action, to protest, but rather something than changes the lifespace by dint of reworking relationships with all other things. For instance, work on tree maiming – malicious attacks on trees as a form of protest – has shown how new ways in which trees were socially enrolled and were used as agents of landscape change often were generative of attacks on the trees themselves. Herein, trees were attacked both as the material problem, as the symbols of dislocations, as proxies of capital, and as proxies for the humans enacting change.Footnote 98 Further, such work has highlighted the importance of many intersectional forms of difference as opposed to the old solitary shibboleth of class, and also the importance of emotion, and of the way in which the tools of rural terror – incendiarism; animal and plant maiming; the sending of threatening letters; and malicious attacks on machines and other property – often went hand-in-hand with forms of collective opposition.Footnote 99 It is this route that we contend the study of protest and resistance needs to follow.
It is important to acknowledge, however, that some initial steps in this direction have already been taken. Several works have now foregrounded the environmental dimensions of Gaelic protest poetry directed at sheep farming, particularly Alexander Dick’s re-examination of the 1792 Bliadhna na Caorach which he understands as expressive of an ‘indigenous Highland environmentalist strand, against … slow violence’.Footnote 100 Taking this one step further, Niall Ingham draws attention to the role of animals in conflict events; a theme under-researched in the Highland historiography but well-established in wider protest studies.Footnote 101 Another significant contribution is found in the work of Juliette Desportes on the responses of their tenantry to the imposition of a new agrarian order on the thirteen landed estates annexed by the British Crown after the ’45 Jacobite rising.Footnote 102 This took the form of not just overt confrontation but also Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak’ and petitions and performative and symbolic displays of hostility. These are all important initial steps albeit limited in their geographical coverage and temporal range. Future research should build on these developments.
To explore protest environments in the everyday in ways such as these is to expand our understandings of the pragmatic and flexible nature of protest rhetoric and the array of mechanisms available to those who worked land and sea. Highlanders and Islanders tapped into a multiplicity of protest repertoires as they navigated, contested, and challenged the unprecedented attacks upon their common rights and way of life. As well legitimizing notions founded upon indigenous concepts such as dùthchas, law and lordship offered avenues to negotiate social relationships. Rab Houston’s comparative study of petitioning across the four nations has suggested that while the Irish turned to action and the English to law to protest their lot, Scots on landed estates preferred to petition in an apolitical and deferential manner.Footnote 103 More research is needed to test this assertion, however, as recent studies have suggested that in adopting a language of rights, petitioning could be an effective weapon in these struggles.Footnote 104
In this way and more, the law was not just a tool employed by the elite but could be means to resist. Tenants were adept at using the courts for their own gains and showed a remarkable understanding of the legal avenues, as well as potential loopholes, available to them. The role of the 1747 Heritable Jurisdictions Act, interpreted as a watershed stripping the elite of a mechanism of social control and, conversely, local people of a crucial arena for redress, has of late been reassessed by the work of Charles Fletcher and Matthew Dziennik. Both have suggested that the elite and local gentry managed to protect their influence through other courts such as the justice of the peace and barony courts.Footnote 105 In addition, there is limited evidence that it seriously affected the people’s use of and access to the law, at least in its immediate aftermath. We know, for instance, that local ‘writers’ (lawyers) were hired to oppose and prevent tenant’s removal in places like the Annexed Estates and Argyll and that estate tenants deftly used legal appeals both in the lower and principal courts between the 1750s and 1790s.Footnote 106 What is now required is further research to uncover the fluidity and adaptability of protest actors as they sought to resist the weight of socio-economic and cultural change bearing down on them, especially as landowners tightened mechanisms for social control with new legislation such as the 1756 Act of Sederunt which enabled summary removal from one’s holding.Footnote 107
At stake, is the ways in which Highlanders’ engagement with political, legal, and religious spheres shaped the methods and practices underpinning resistance. Discussions regarding the meanings attached to the concept of right in the Highlands have too often been limited to the attachment to land, with dùthchas used as a convenient shorthand to summarise and explain subsequent protest. Yet Highlanders operated in a world of cultural pluralism. Badenoch tacksmen deployed the language of ‘improvement’ and aggressively pursued commercialism while referring to their holdings as their dùthchas and saw little contradiction in doing so.Footnote 108 Gaels and Highlanders’ understandings of their rights as active members of a community of practice at local, regional, and national scales were simultaneously influenced and shaped by other cultural, political, and social factors. Nor were the Highlands isolated from the rest of Britain: the writings of Tom Paine were undoubtedly circulated in the Highlands and Islands, and the Rights of Man likely translated into Gaelic.Footnote 109 Where the literature is more deficient is in recognising the possibility that such broader ‘political’ concerns can figure in and help develop the wider protest literature. Whether rooted in indigenous thought, common law, radical political thinking, or the ‘covenanting idiom’, Highlanders’ and Islanders’ conception of their rights provided a foundation for the formulation of demands and discourses of resistance across the early modern and modern periods in ways that demand further investigation.Footnote 110
To do so would importantly shift the ground away from the view that the tenantry and other members of the rural poor only protested over access to land which has helped enshrine the idea of the Highlands as rooted in, to draw on the concept of Edward Said, an imagined geography in which the politics of land explains the course of the past 275 years.Footnote 111 This is not to deny or denigrate the importance of this fundamental building block of the Gaelic ethical belief system – ‘the basis of social relationships with humanity past, present and future, and with God’ – but to suggest a view that places land into a melting pot of other factors and facets that drove and determined protest in the Highlands.Footnote 112 Tropes of Highland exceptionalism have long excluded the region from discussions about industrial relations, underpinned by the assumption that rural workers were insulated from workplace politics and lacked the tactics of the urban working classes with the consequent failure to develop a more holistic and nuanced view of protest across the Highlands and Islands. There was, for instance, indications of ‘early trade unionism’ with unrest at the Ballachulish and Easdale quarries forcing management to change payment practices.Footnote 113 Later, in the mid-nineteenth century, there were strikes on Skye and unrest in the knitting industry on the island. Crucially, James Arnaud has suggested that these examples prefigured a later tradition of resistance in the region during the 1880s land wars, but earlier examples of economic – and political – assertion exist.Footnote 114
One possible sheet-anchor to progress in this direction may be the nature of the surviving evidence. Estate archives include few sources in the unmediated voices of Highlanders and even fewer in Gaelic. The inherent bias of estate authorities compounded by their reluctance to report protest events, demands a critical engagement with the material which has at times been found lacking.Footnote 115 As a result, Gaelic voices have been marginalised although work by Kidd and MacKinnon among others has recently re-centred Gaelic experiences of dispossession in important ways.Footnote 116 When acts of protest appear in the archives, it was usually because it was deemed worthy of record, the ‘tip of an iceberg of unknowable size’.Footnote 117 Such limitations can be at least partially overcome by a deeper engagement across a broad range of material. Records from the lower courts of law, for example, have been neglected by historians of protest, but there is much to gain by exploring the world of regalities, baronies, and sheriffdoms.Footnote 118 When combined ‘in imaginative ways’ with the conceptual innovations of recent protest historiography, the world of protest and resistance beyond collective action is opened up.Footnote 119
This is all to suggest that Highland resistance should be understood in a broader geographical and historical context but also with an eye on the local environments that gave such events life. To do so would be to address the well-established and untested paradigms dominating Highland protest historiography. As Arnaud’s recent study of protest in the famine era noted,
Oddly, Richards’ claim that there was a ‘continuum of Highland protest’ throughout the nineteenth century actually seems to be correct, but not for the reasons that he asserted. Attempts to manage the Highlands and its population were persistently opposed through acts of sabotage, assertions of elites’ obligations in the Gàidhealtachd and quotidian protest, rather than the instances of aggressive confrontation which tended to be more sporadic. The famine era, and forms of resistance against the Central Board, foreshadowed the later maturation of sustained resistance (…)Footnote 120
In turn, the shift in emphasis to the everyday questions the very distinctiveness of the Highland experience of phenomena of improvement and agrarian capitalism. Indeed, one of the great paradoxes of studies of Highland protest remains Richards’ suggestion there existed a distinctive mode of Highland resistance while second-guessing its relevance. In his 1974 article, Richards took care to stress the universal dimension of protest in the Highlands and Islands as a form of peasant response to agrarian transformation. Upon returning to Smout’s idea of ‘the Highland ideology’ underpinning protest (or lack thereof), he concluded that these ‘attitudes may have been less exclusively Highland and more widely characteristic of pre-industrial societies to an extent that would transcend the specifically regional focus offered by Smout’.Footnote 121 It is a matter of some regret, therefore, that Devine’s influential bifurcation between the ‘Highlands’ and ‘Lowlands’ clearances seems to have enshrined a geographic duality built on the contrasting responses and experiences of agrarian change whilst leaving Richards’ original assertion untested.Footnote 122 Even the recent turn towards understanding Gaelic as a uniting force still excludes those areas east and south of the paradigmatic ‘Highlands’ despite experiencing similar process.Footnote 123 As recent work makes clear, the Highlands were not a bounded, isolated, entity but were instead deeply connected to the ‘lowlands’, Scotland’s major urban centres and other parts of Britain, Ireland, and beyond.Footnote 124 There remains a need to ask whether there existed a distinctive Highland repertoire of resistance.
Conclusion
It is unsurprising that early work on Highlands and Islands protest looked to the region alone. Historians were engaging with the momentous socio-cultural and economic changes, which afflicted those who worked land and sea across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is thus understandable that in essaying the reaction and response to these changes, the focus was almost entirely on the dramatic and one-off. Historians had vital stories to tell, with significantly wider resonances, the consequences, and afterlives of which continue to reverberate, both positively and negatively, in the region today. Less understandable are the aftershocks of these momentous early ground-shifting contributions. Despite the best efforts of a small number of established and, most excitingly, early-career researchers, a particular genealogy of protest continues to dominate a historiography, which has largely failed to look for the hidden transcripts and everyday resistances of Highland social relations. Even if this is not to downplay the impact of the most recent work on Highlands and Islands protest and resistance, there can be no doubt that there remains work to be done.
This process of deepening and revising explanation of Highland and Island protest may most convincingly begin with an ever-sharper focus on the archive and the consolidation and driving forward of recent positive developments in Scottish protest studies. There is a need, we contend, to take a more holistic view, and to turn our attention to protest action before 1800 and the ways people across society engaged with the early phases of agrarian improvement and commercialisation. Alongside a chronological swing towards earlier periods, historians should adopt a wider geographical focus, looking for protest not just in the paradigmatic ‘Highland resistance’ areas of the north west but also across a wider Highland region. Alongside this, we should challenge some well-entrenched old shibboleths, most notably the shapes that protest and resistance took. Beyond short-lived collective action in response to clearance, protest should be understood more broadly, as a response to lived struggles and the dynamics of social relations in the spaces of everyday lives. In this, the environment is central: as lived space; as material resource; as source of meaning and attachment to place. Protest always speaks not just to socio-economic dislocations but to other senses of dispossession and loss. To landscapes that had been an anchor of identity and meaning, but which became subject to forms of making private. To avoid this is a weakness that needs addressing.
This focus on rural protest in the longue durée may in turn offer an opportunity to complete Richards’ original mission, which was to move beyond the artificial separation between the land wars and earlier responses to improvement. In this, Richards sought to stress some continuities in terms of both the focus of protest and the practice of protest between the eighteenth century and the 1880s land wars. Undoubtedly, there is truth in this. Land, unsurprisingly, remained, intensified even, as the key focus of popular protest. Likewise, there is a family resemblance in some of the occasional attempts to maintain access to land in the 1700s and early 1800s with later attempts to take back the land. Yet we think it unlikely that any amount of archival digging will uncover anything between 1750 and the 1820s that even vaguely resembles the later land raids, let alone the organisational forms adopted by 1880s land activists. Further, by focusing solely on forms of collective, sporadic action, we are in danger anyway of adopting an unhelpful teleology in which earlier protests are seen as mere rehearsals for what followed.
By contrast, turning to quotidian expressions of resistance has the potential of stressing the persistence and sophistication of contestation involving feet dragging, legal opposition, petitioning, and much more. Future research must aim to bring into the light those more hidden forms of resistance such as threats and attacks on estate factors and their underlings, resistance to acts of enclosure, and the making private of once commonable land. To ask the questions of when, why, where, and how people resisted changes to their environment and way of life is long overdue. Our ultimate aim needs to shift to consider a closer reading of the environments which figured the resort to protest.
There are two further directions of great potential that rural protest studies might travel. One would be an ever-greater embracing of the local and particular, towards a micro-spatial, perhaps micro-geography of protest environments.Footnote 125 The other would recognise that the rise of global history has usefully forced us to think more about connection, interdependence, circuits of capital, as well as rule and misrule. Whichever route is followed, any future work must look to the full range of protest forms not only in the Highlands and Islands, but invite comparisons, draw parallels, and highlight differences with the rest of Scotland, Europe, and beyond. To do so would be to take some steps to bridge the historiographical and geographical divides which have for too long divided Scottish protest studies. To think only of the Highlands and Islands is to imagine a world that never existed.
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