In 1876 Lord Derby's Return of the Owners of Land revealed the extent to which landed property in Britain was concentrated in relatively few hands. Three-quarters of all land was owned by about 5,000 people, and the largest holdings of all were those of the third duke of Sutherland, who possessed about 1.3 million acres, the vast majority in the north of Scotland. It is surprising, therefore, that the history of the Sutherland estate—the largest in western Europe by 1850—has received comparatively little scholarly attention, and especially so given the close associations between this ducal family and the notorious Highland clearances of smallholding crofter communities in the early nineteenth century, an association that, as Annie Tindley demonstrates, cast a very long shadow indeed. A volume in the admirable Scottish Historical Review monographs series, this book, then, fills a significant gap, while also providing economic, rural, and agricultural historians with a useful in-depth case study of a very large aristocratic estate and its practices of management.

Arising from an Edinburgh University PhD thesis, the book is a careful piece of research largely based on the Sutherland estate papers. Taking a chronological approach, it examines the policies and fortunes of the estate from the mid-nineteenth century until circa 1920. It shows how, in these years of change and turbulence for the landed elite, the estate's commissioners, factors, and other officials grappled with a daunting array of challenges. These included maintaining rental income in the context of agricultural depression and tenant grievances, undertaking land reclamation projects designed to demonstrate agricultural forward-thinking and boost their employer's clearance-tarnished public image, and dealing with the implications of land reform legislation. These were challenges that could never have been met with anything approaching success, and so the story told here is—from the estate's point of view—one of frustration, disappointment, and gradual decline although not outright extinction (in 1919, the fifth duke's landed property totaled 385,000 acres, a very substantial amount but rather reduced in size from its Victorian heyday). In a sense, this was the story of the great estate generally in these years, and so the experience of the dukes of Sutherland—despite their vast wealth—in some ways parallels that of other large landowners, as Tindley points out.

Yet in doing this, the book also demonstrates the peculiarly Scottish character of the family's predicament. Central to this predicament were the crofters. These small farmers were vulnerable to crop failure and poor fishing seasons, which meant rent arrears were endemic. What estate officials called their “perverse habit” (27) of parceling out their holdings among family members who squatted as cottars on common or subdivided land made their situation more precarious, yet—not least because of the infamy of the Clearances—mass eviction was not an option. Hence, a form of subsistence agriculture continued in many areas, to the detriment of estate finances. Things were made worse by the crofter agitations of the 1880s, which led to legislation in 1886 instituting the judicial setting of rents and the canceling of arrears. This ensured the preservation of crofting communities in Sutherland on into the twentieth century. The fourth duke's attempt in the 1890s to encourage crofters to transform themselves into peasant proprietors met with abject failure as the typical crofter lacked the capital for land purchase even on quite favorable terms.

The crofter problem and the associated memory of the Clearances were factors in some of the other challenges faced by the estate management. Anxious to improve the family's reputation, the third duke embarked on a land improvement scheme in 1869, aiming to reclaim 45,000 acres from waste for the purposes of modern, scientific farming. In the event, just 3,471 acres had been reclaimed by 1886 at a cost of over £210,000, the vast outlay unfortunately coinciding with a dramatic fall in agricultural prices. This extravagance became as much about the creation of good press as enhanced revenues, but as critics noted, its intended beneficiaries were not the crofters, whose sufferings during the Clearances had caused the family's bad publicity in the first place. As Tindley shows in chapter 6, the tensions implicit in this irony came to a head in Clashmore, where a model farm was established on reclaimed land in the 1870s, its completion necessitating the removal of crofting families. In the years that followed, crofter land hunger and anger at uncompensated displacement collided with the management's desire that land be cultivated on “modern” lines (for example, the abrasive factor Evander McIver was hotly opposed to a crofter takeover of the farm, which would just create “a nursery for paupers”; 147).

The collision between crofters and officials at Clashmore—and on the Sutherland estate generally—can be seen as reflecting the Highland Scottish land question as a whole. This study adds significantly to our understanding of that question by supplying an account of the approach taken to it by the management of a great estate; indeed, as Tindley acknowledges, it is an estate-centric approach. There is nothing wrong with this—such approaches shed valuable insights—but it is perhaps excessively focused on “the background and reasoning” (167) of management decisions. More might have been said about the ideology behind this reasoning, in particular in relation to the crofters. We get glimpses from time to time (McIver's contempt for crofters as “Celts” is one example; 147), but a thoroughgoing analysis of just why the management failed to understand the crofters’ land hunger is lacking. This may be a function of the sources used, estate papers giving less insight, perhaps, into belief systems than the nitty-gritty of policy and practice, but if so the use of additional material might have remedied this deficiency, if only by situating the practices of the estate in a more completely realized ideological and political context. This is, after all, quite a short book; it might have been a little longer. That said, it is also a useful one and will be consulted with interest and profit by scholars.