Clearance and Improvement E-Book

Tom M. Devine

• Herausgeber: John Donald
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 590

Beschreibung

Social and economic changes included an increase in production of food and raw materials, in turn sustaining the remarkable growth of towns and cities over this period. However, in the folk memory of Scotland the social and cultural costs of the revolution loom much larger: the loss of land for many thousands of families; the rise of individualism and the decline of neighborhood; the death of old rural societies which had formed Scotland's character for many generations. The drama and tragedy of Highland history during this period have attracted many authors, whereas the Lowland experience, that of the majority of Scots, hardly any. This book attempts to redress that balance, and in so doing examines why this extraordinary era, inextricably associated with failure, famine and clearance in Gaeldom, is remembered as one of 'improvements' in the Lowlands, where the folk memory of dispossession, if it ever existed, is long lost in collective amnesia. In so doing, Devine addresses an issue which goes right to the heart of the nation's past.

Leseprobe

CLEARANCE AND IMPROVEMENT

CLEARANCE AND IMPROVEMENT

Land, Power and People in Scotland, 1700–1900

T. M. Devine

This eBook was published in Great Britain in 2022 by John Donald,

an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by John Donald

Copyright © T.M. Devine, 2006

eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 405 4

The right of T.M. Devine to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

The publishers gratefully acknowledge the support of the Strathmartine Trust towards the publication of this book

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

For

Mia Elizabeth

born 13 June 2005

Contents

Preface

List of Abbreviations

  1. Introduction: Clearance and Improvement

  2. Irish and Scottish Development Revisited

  3. The Great Landlords of Lowland Scotland and Agrarian Change in the Eighteenth Century

  4. Empire and Land: Glasgow’s Colonial Merchants

  5. The Highland and Lowland Clearances

  6. The Making of a Farming Elite? Lowland Scotland, 1750–1850

  7. Dispossession: Subtenants and Cottars

  8. Scottish Farm Service in the Agricultural Revolution

  9. A Conservative People? Scottish Gaeldom in the Age of Improvement

10. Highland Migration to Lowland Scotland, 1760–1860

11. The Emergence of the New Elite in the Western Highlands and Islands, 1800–1860

12. Why the Highlands did not Starve: Ireland and Highland Scotland during the Potato Famine

Notes

Index

Preface

One significant theme in my own historical research over the past thirty years and more has been the great transformation in the rural world of Scotland which broadly occurred between the 1760s and the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The changes which took place over that period do merit the term ‘revolution’. A way of life which had remained generally unchanged over several centuries rapidly took on a new shape, pace and structure. There were bonuses from these changes, notably a very significant increase in the production of foods and raw materials, one of the vital preconditions for the sustained development of the great manufacturing towns and cities which were experiencing equally remarkable growth in these decades. Perhaps, however, in the folk memory of Scotland the social and cultural costs of the revolution loom much larger: the loss of land for many thousands of families; the rise of individualism and the decline of neighbourhood; the death of old rural societies which had formed Scotland’s character for many generations.

This complexity is one theme which runs through this book. Another is the comparative experience of the Highlands and Lowlands during this time of social and economic revolution. The two stories are often seen in contrast or even imbalance. The drama and tragedy of Highland history have attracted many authors; the Lowland experience, that of the majority of Scots, hardly any. This book tries to correct that imbalance. There are five chapters on the Lowlands, four on the Highlands and three which treat both regions together.

But there is also a deeper purpose. To a greater or lesser extent the essays which follow represent an attempt to deal with an historical conundrum. Both parts of Scotland were affected by the powerful influence of landlord power, demographic forces, industrialisation and the new market economy. Yet each (outside the southern and eastern Highlands) responded differently. Economic and social change in Gaeldom became associated with failure, famine and clearance. In most of the Lowlands, however, this extraordinary period is remembered as one of ‘improvement’, and the folk memory of dispossession, if it ever existed, is long lost in collective amnesia. Why this should be so is a question asked directly or indirectly throughout this book. It is an issue which goes right to the heart of the nation’s past. Whether or not I have come up with any convincing answers to an intriguing problem is for the reader to judge.

Thanks are due to Margaret Begbie, the late Janet Hendry and John Tuckwell for their help in the preparation of the material. Mairi Sutherland of Birlinn was an excellent support throughout the process of production. I am also most grateful to both editors and publishers for allowing the reprint of my essays in this form. Original conventions of referencing and citation have been followed throughout. The papers are presented here as they first appeared and no attempt has been made to include revisions in the light of more recent research. Likewise, since the essays originally appeared as independent, free-standing contributions there is likely to be some minor overlap and repetition of material. The chapters which follow first appeared in the following:

  1.T.M. Devine, C.H. Lee and G.C. Peden (eds), The Transformation of Scotland: The Economy since 1700 (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 73–99

  2.D. Dickson and C. Ó Gráda (eds), Refiguring Ireland: Essays in Honour of L.M. Cullen (Dublin, 2003), pp. 37–51

  3.S. Foster, A. Macinnes and R. MacInnes (eds), Scottish Power Centres from the Early Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Glasgow, 1998), pp. 148–61

  4.J.T. Ward and R.G. Wilson (eds), Land and Industry: The Landed Estate and the Industrial Revolution (Newton Abbot, 1971), pp. 205–65

  5.R.A. Houston and I.D. Whyte (eds), Scottish Society, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 148–68

  6.T.M. Devine (ed.), Scottish Elites (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 62–76

  7.T.M. Devine, The Transformation of Rural Scotland (Edinburgh, 1994), pp. 136–64

  8.T.M. Devine (ed.), Farm Servants and Labour in Lowland Scotland, 1770–1914 (Edinburgh, 1984), pp. 1–8

  9.T.M. Devine and J.R. Young (eds), Eighteenth Century Scotland: New Perspectives (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 225–36

10.The Scottish Historical Review LXII, 2: No. 174: October 1983, pp. 137–49

11.T.M. Devine (ed.), Improvement and Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 108–42

12.S.J. Connolly, R.A. Houston and R.J. Morris (eds), Conflict, Identity and Economic Development: Ireland and Scotland, 1600–1939 (Preston, 1995), pp. 77–88

Abbreviations

BCP: Bill Chamber Process

ESRC: Economic and Social Research Council

GCA: Glasgow City Archives

GRS: General Register of Sasines

HPL: Hamilton Public Library

ML: Mitchell Library

NLS: National Library of Scotland

NRA(S): National Register of Archives, Scotland

NSA: New Statistical Accounts

OSA: Old Statistical Accounts

PP: Parliamentary Papers

PRS: Particular Register of Sasines

SL: Signet Library

SRO: Scottish Record Office (now National Archives of Scotland)

ONE

Introduction: Clearance and Improvement

Industrialisation and agricultural transformation in Scotland were two sides of the same coin. So closely connected were the two movements that unravelling the complex texture of inter-relationships is a challenging task. On the one hand, the remarkable rise of industrial and urban employments in the eighteenth century created a much enlarged market of non-food producers, which in turn generated a massive new demand for the produce of Scottish farms. It was apparently this factor above all else which provided the crucial incentive for investment and innovation in the new husbandry from the middle decades of the eighteenth century.1 Equally, however, agriculture itself was also one of the primary foundations of the Industrial Revolution. Without radical increase in the production of both foods and raw materials from within Scotland until the early nineteenth century, the whole process of rapid economic growth might have stalled.

In theory, of course, the emerging industrial communities could have increasingly purchased their vital food needs from abroad. By the 1790s, for instance, imports of oats and oatmeal from Ireland were reckoned to be feeding around 40,000 Scots (or 2.5 per cent of the population), most of whom lived in the industrialising west of the country.2 But foreign imports were no panacea in these critically important early decades of the economic revolution. For one thing, the outbreak of the French Wars meant that continental Europe ceased to be a significant source of grain supply for Scotland after 1795. For another, Ireland was never more than a marginal exporter of meal to the Scottish market and, occasionally, as in 1800, when the Irish ports were closed, ceased to have much real significance.3 Only from the second decade of the nineteenth century did imports from overseas once again become important. Until then, at least, the success of the industrial economy depended in large part on the response of indigenous agriculture and its related activities. Vast increases in grain, animal and raw material production were delivered. Over a sixty-year period from the 1750s, the estimated output of corn and green crops in the Lothians doubled and that of slaughtered animals rose sixfold.4 One other telling indicator of the cycle of growth in grain output was the spectacular advance in the quantity of malting barley charged for duty. In 1809–10, 784,527 bushels were produced in Scotland; by 1840 the figure was over 4.3 millions.5 Pastoral farming was also remarkably buoyant, most notoriously in the Highlands, where the rapid expansion of sheep numbers was often marked by the widespread displacement of many communities. To take but one county example, Argyll had 278,000 sheep in 1800, 827,000 in 1855 and over a million by 1880.6 The seas around Scotland were also exploited on an unprecedented scale. By the 1820s great fleets of over 3,000 boats would gather for the annual herring fishery along the east coast from the northern tip of Caithness to Buchan in Aberdeenshire. Catches rose relentlessly from over 100,000 barrels cured in 1812–15 to around 600,000 barrels by the early 1850s.7

This varied revolution in production brought many benefits to the process of industrialisation. More labour could now be released from the cultivation of food to the manufacture of goods and the provision of services. Grain prices did rise, especially between 1795 and 1812 and particularly in years of poor harvests. Crucially, however, food prices did not go through the roof. Indeed, real wages actually rose for the majority in most years between c. 1770 and c. 1800, thus increasing the domestic market for producers of consumer goods. Furthermore, as a result of the energetic response from Scottish farmers, a rising and increasingly urbanised population had less need to rely on foreign food imports. Such a dependency might have placed pressure on the balance of payments by leading in turn to an outflow of cash to pay for grain, higher interest rates in the banking system and a general slowdown in economic activity.

The Scottish countryside was also a key source of raw materials for industry. Certainly, cotton and, to a lesser extent, linen, depended crucially on external supplies of wool and flax respectively but elsewhere indigenous supplies were vital. The woollen industry relied on the great sheep ranches of the Borders and the Highlands. Timber was used for building, internal furnishings, pit-props for the burgeoning mining industry and a host of other activities. The inland transport of goods and people would have been impossible without the thousands of horses bred on Scottish farms annually, not least the Clydesdale, regarded as the best heavy draught horse of its day. Animal carcasses provided hides for the tanners, bone for the glue-makers and fats for soap and candle manufacturers. Straw was universally used for packaging and as litter in urban stables. Taken together, all this represented a factor of strategic significance in industrial expansion. Without agricultural transformation, then, the Scottish economic miracle in general might have been jeopardised.

THE RURAL LOWLANDS: BEFORE IMPROVEMENT, 1700–c. 1750

In order to appreciate fully the scale and speed of agricultural transformation it is necessary to place it in historical context by providing a brief sketch of the traditional farming regime. Traditionally, Scottish agriculture before the era of widespread Improvement has had a bad press. It was seen as inert in structure, primitive in technique and wasteful of both land and labour. ‘Improving’ writers of the later eighteenth century waxed eloquent about the supposedly absurd defects of techniques such as the ‘infield/outfield’ system of cultivation, the basic form of agricultural organisation throughout the old order in Scotland. The infield was the best land, worked continuously and given an almost ‘gardenly’ care. Outfield land was poorer and more extensive, cultivated for shorter periods. But these later commentators were far from objective. They had a vested interest in praising the new and condemning the old. Essentially the ‘improving’ writers saw themselves as propagandists for more ‘enlightened’ farming practices and tended to select evidence skilfully to support and promote their cause.8

Modern research on estate archives and other contemporary sources has helped to provide a more realistic picture of traditional agriculture.9 First, in broad terms, it met the essential food needs of Scottish society at the time. After the horrors of the ‘Lean Years’ of the 1690s, there were some difficult times in 1709, 1724–5 and again in 1740–41 but no major harvest crisis. Compare this with the record in Ireland, where famines in the early 1740s are reckoned to have killed an even larger proportion of the population than ‘the Great Hunger’ a century later.10 Second, the cultivation methods so vehemently condemned by later writers had a basic rationale at the time. For instance, the universal practice of ploughing the land into long ‘rigs’ (or ridges), where the crops were grown and which were divided by deep furrows, was essential for draining off surface water when there was no alternative system before underground tile pipes became common in the nineteenth century. Similarly, the splitting of land into strips and patches and the distribution of small plots to tenants, subtenants and cottars may have seemed illogical from a later perspective, but were vital in order to provide families with some ground for meeting their own needs for food. The communal working practices of the time, which involved everything from house-building to peat-cutting, were an effective way of pooling the labour power of men, women and children when virtually every job had to be done by hand and ‘technology’ was mainly confined to tools like the spade, sickle and flail. A communal approach was also favoured in the management of outfields. Each year, different parts rested as others were brought under the plough. The process could work effectively only if there were some planning and common controls, so that different tenants followed an agreed sequence each year of breaking land in or deciding to return it to pasture. A similar strategy was adopted to prevent overgrazing by allocating each tenant a given number of animals through the practice known as ‘stenting’ or ‘souming’. Regulation and co-operation had to be at the heart of the old system.

Third, Lowland agriculture before the 1750s was far from being static or inflexible. In some areas, a changing balance developed between each part of the system, with outfield expanding at the expense of infield as farmers and proprietors took advantage of the booming droving trade to England and the Scottish towns to lay down more land to pasture for stock fattening. In addition, in the main arable districts of the Lowlands, especially the Lothians and Berwickshire, infield systems had become more sophisticated, with four-course rotations of wheat, bere (a hardy form of barley), oats and legumes. Liming had also steadily been adopted by more and more tenants during the seventeenth century; it helped to break down the acidity in the soil and was especially valuable in helping to open up areas of outfield to regular cultivation. The early systematic use of lime for this purpose can be traced back to the 1620s and, by the early eighteenth century, liming had become a common feature of Scottish Lowland agriculture. Through regular application, tenants in areas particularly well endowed for grain growing were able to expand their infields at the expense of outfields and specialise more in arable agriculture. Thus in Roxburgh and Berwick by the early eighteenth century, outfield cultivation had become much more intensive, with two-thirds under crop on some estates. In outline, this was a trend towards the unified pattern of cultivation which was eventually to become characteristic of improved agriculture.

Fourth, the social organisation of the old countryside was more complex than often suggested.11 The basic community unit was the fermtoun, small settlements of little more than fifteen to twenty households dispersed across a countryside virtually bereft of the hedges, ditches, dikes, roads or any of the other artificial constructions of the modern rural landscape. The touns varied widely in size. In more developed areas of the Lothians and Berwickshire they were big enough to seem like villages. Elsewhere, they were as few as half a dozen families living in settlements apparently randomly scattered across land where patches of arable were separated by bigger stretches of bog and moorland. These clusters of people all had their own internal hierarchies. The rent-paying élite were at the top and then ranked below them were subtenants and cottars (given patches of land in return for seasonal work in the larger holdings), together with fulltime farm servants and a range of tradesmen, blacksmiths, weavers and shoemakers, who supplied many of the needs of the local community.

Significant changes were already taking place within this ancient structure before c. 1750. The tenant class was steadily contracting in size, with thrusting individuals bettering themselves at the expense of others by absorbing more land in the townships. The most significant illustration of this trend was the expansion of holdings held by one tenant and a fall in the number of farms possessed by several husbandmen. The enlarged single tenancy was geared more to serving markets and less constrained by communal working practices, and the farm under one master was to become the ideal of the Improvers later in the eighteenth century. A study of a wide sample of holdings in five Lowland counties suggests that more than half the farms were still in ‘multiple tenancy’ at the time of the Union of 1707.12 However, in the next few decades this form of tenure was seen to be in rapid decline. Indeed, in most of the estates examined, single tenancy was overwhelmingly dominant by the 1740s, with only around one-fifth of all holdings now containing two or more possessors. Within the old world, therefore, an embryonic rural middle class was emerging in some areas.13

The impact of the ‘new’ tenantry was nowhere more apparent than in the Borders, where great sheep ranches with large areas of hill grazing and limited arable holdings in the valleys were already well established in the eastern counties by the late seventeenth century. One result of this territorial expansion was the unrelenting squeezing out of the rural population. Abandoned remains of touns which were inhabited into the early eighteenth century can be found throughout the Tweed valley and in Eskdale. Similarly, a number of the parish entries for this region in the Statistical Account of the 1790s describe once-populated settlements which were now visible only as mouldering remains. Over a hundred years before the Highland Clearances, the advance of the commercialised sheep farms in the deep south of Scotland was causing widespread depopulation. In the western Borders, for instance, Sir David Dunbar at Baldoon, near Wigtown, built a huge cattle park over two and a half miles long and one and a half in breadth to winter over a thousand beasts. Dunbar was only one of several Borders proprietors who let their estates to commercially minded tenants for specialist stock-rearing.14

There is considerable evidence, therefore, that the old farming had an intrinsic effectiveness, by and large served the food needs of the time well and was also capable of flexibility and adjustment. It has to be remembered, however, that the vast majority of Scots still lived and worked in the countryside in this period. Most of the population were both food producers and consumers rather than (as was to be the case in the later era of urbanisation and industrialisation) simply consumers of farm produce. Even modest improvements in efficiency or marketing could therefore satisfy contemporary needs by adding to grain surpluses. This is shown clearly in the broad stability of meal prices in most years during the first half of the eighteenth century. In addition, despite advances in cultivation, crop yields remained relatively low. On the best infield lands, yields of four seeds to one might be obtained but on the outfields the averages remained well below three to one.15

Production for the market was on the increase but the subsistence needs of the family and locality still took priority in most areas. The preponderance of small farms of below 30 acres in size in many districts and the widespread custom of splitting land into small patches as subsistence plots for subtenants and cottars tends to confirm this pattern.16 Further, despite some significant changes in the social structure of the farming communities, notably among the tenantry, the rural landscape had altered little in most areas outside the more favoured Lothians region. Estate maps of the 1750s still show the old familiar patterns of scattered infields and outfields, rig cultivation, absence of enclosed fields and large areas of moor and bog land. It was a landscape which had still more in common with that of earlier centuries than with the age of improvement when the countryside was transformed forever.

THE RURAL LOWLANDS: TRANSFORMATION

It was the historic changes in the markets for grain, animal products and raw materials which above all else shaped the transformation of the rural economy. The Scottish population rose by two-thirds from 1,265,000 in c. 1755 to over 2 millions by 1820. The unprecedented speed and scale of urban development created A huge increase in the number of Scots who had to buy food rather than grow it for themselves. Rising living standards in the later eighteenth century, especially for the middle, artisan and professional classes, deepened market demand for rural produce and at the same time made it more diverse.17 Grain prices soared, even in counties not at the centre of the new industrialism. For instance, average prices for oats in Fife for the years 1765–70 were 56 per cent higher than for the period 1725–50, while those for 1805–10 showed a further staggering increase of 300 per cent. There was now a much greater incentive for landlords and farmers to invest and experiment, especially since the revolution in rural transport, with the construction of parish and turnpike roads, canals and, eventually, railways, brought the new class of urban and industrial consumers ever closer to the producer.

But we also need to probe the reasons why the rural communities in the Lowlands managed to respond so vigorously to these market opportunities.18 At least in the first phase of Improvement down to the early nineteenth century, landowners and their factors were at the heart of the process. Their basic advantage was that in most parts of the Lowlands, outside some districts in the south-west, land was worked through tenancies governed by leases. Peasant proprietors were few and far between. Scottish landowners therefore possessed full legal rights of eviction at the end of a fixed-term lease which gave influence not only over the changing composition of the tenantry but also the power to build in mandatory improving clauses which were enforceable at law. Contemporary court records show that many landowners routinely used legal muscle to force the adoption of new cropping practices. The very fact that the leaders of the old society as a class were such enthusiastic supporters and proponents of the new economic order was itself of profound significance because it lent a crucial legitimacy to the whole course of agrarian reform.

Perhaps three main reasons can be advanced to explain why Scotland’s landed élites embraced the new agronomy so eagerly. First, the costs of landed status were rising steeply in the eighteenth century, an era which has been rightly described as one of competitive display when higher social position was increasingly defined by material status. The aristocracy and many of the lairds now aspired to standards of unprecedented splendour with grander houses, more elaborate furnishings and decoration and impressive estate parklands which were meant to convey the special standing of their owners. To this Revolution of Manners was added new demographic pressures as landed families became bigger and both costs of education for sons and dowries for daughters rose accordingly. Scottish landowners, traditionally among the poorer élites of Europe, had to search for fresh sources of income.

Second, the Scottish intellectual revolution of the time fed through into agrarian reform as the rationalism of the Enlightenment helped to change humankind’s relationship to the environment. No longer was nature accepted as given or preordained; instead, it could and should be altered for the better or ‘Improved’ by systematic intervention. Improvement became not simply a matter of vital material concern but an intellectual movement which soon attracted a veritable army of theorists, propagandists and commentators. A crucial conduit between the world of ideas in the universities and the practical business of radically changing farming routines was the new class of estate factors, many of them were university-trained lawyers who had sat in the lecture rooms of such giants of the Scottish Enlightenment as Adam Smith, Francis Hutchison, Adam Ferguson and John Millar and others.

Third, the role of new men and new money in the landed structure should not be underestimated. English historians are now generally sceptical about the central relationship between Empire and economic growth in this period. But the impact of imperial profits may have been more significant in Scotland, where alternative sources of income were still more limited than south of the border and where the involvement in empire of the sons of lairds, merchants and professionals was, on average, so much greater.19 Many of these adventurers were sojourners who went overseas to try to make their fortunes and then return home with capital to buy land or invest in the estates of their own families. Some, probably a minority, did achieve great success. Thus by 1815, the counties around Glasgow were ringed by the properties of the city’s tobacco lords and sugar princes while, in parts of the Borders, Highland and eastern Lowlands, returning Indian ‘nabobs’ were conspicuous and colourful figures. Precise evaluation of their role awaits further research.

At the same time, the long-term contribution of the landed classes needs to be kept in perspective. Current knowledge suggests that their intervention was critical in the first phase of the agricultural revolution, broadly from the 1760s to the end of the century. Even during this period, however, the tenants who actually worked the land were moving to centre stage and they became the dominant force from the 1790s. As noted earlier, even within the old order, a developing but potentially powerful business class was emerging within the farming community as more holdings were merged and larger single tenancies became more committed to servicing the market. In the later eighteenth century this process accelerated and, at the same time, improved methods spread as landowners invested in enclosure, new roads, liming and better farmhouses in return for increased rents. The speed of adaptation was remarkable, even given regional and local differences, as higher produce prices in most years during the Napoleonic Wars demonstrated the handsome profits that the new systems could now secure for both proprietors and many, if not all, farmers. For instance, in more than a third of parishes in four typical Lowland counties (Angus, Fife, Ayrshire and Lanarkshire) the traditional scattered patchwork of strips of land had already been gathered in the 1790s into compact fields divided by hedge and ditch. The process of rapid dissemination must also have been aided by the impressive standards of literacy among the rural communities since so much of the new knowledge was spread in printed form through a profusion of books, pamphlets and journals, which poured from the press.

The revolution that was fashioned by these varied forces and responses had many different facets. Perhaps the most fundamental was the change in orientation. The old world of subsistence farming crumbled and finally collapsed while the market by the early decades of the nineteenth century established virtual total dominance in most Lowland areas. Farms throughout the region became geared to satisfying the cities and towns for grain, butter, cheese, eggs, meat and a host of other articles ranging from sour milk for bleaching to timber for construction. The Lowlands had long been a complex mosaic of different farming traditions. In the era of Improvement, the distinctions became even sharper as the demand from the towns and industrial districts encouraged farmers to specialise more in what they did best in the light of local climatic and geological circumstances. Thus the clay lands of Ayrshire, Renfrewshire and western Lanarkshire became more significant as centres of dairying with the growth of commercial cheese- and butter-making for the booming centres of the Industrial Revolution. Around all of Scotland’s major cities market gardening for potatoes, hay, grain and turnips to feed the teeming populations of the expanding urban areas also became more common. The south-east, including the counties of East Lothian, Fife, Berwick and Roxburgh, were traditionally the richest arable districts in Scotland. Their capacity was further enhanced by the rapid adoption of the new rotations, allowing intensive cropping of wheat and barley. The Borders, reaching northwards to the southern parishes of Lanarkshire and Ayrshire, had long specialised in sheep farming in the eastern and central parishes and cattle-rearing in the west. Now the region became more closely integrated with arable areas to the north and east, where the stocks were fattened for sale. Again, in the hill country of the central and eastern Lowlands, the pastoral farms were growing bigger and in the process forcing the removal of small tenants and cottars. There was a stream of complaints from parish ministers in the 1790s that social displacement and depopulation were widespread in some of these districts. In the north-east counties, the balance of agricultural activity was also altering as additional stretches of land were laid down to grass and more and more farmers became committed to cattle breeding and fattening. It was an early sign of this region’s emergence as an international centre of excellence for stock-rearing later in the nineteenth century and the home of the celebrated Aberdeen-Angus breed.

But the revolution also transformed the visual appearance of the countryside. By the 1840s a recognisably modern landscape of trim fields, compact farms, new roads and rural villages had emerged from the confused assortment of strips, rigs and open moor which had characterised the Lowlands since time immemorial. The new patterns were designed to maximise the productive capacity of the soil by bringing the land into a regular sequence of continuous cultivation through systematic fallowing and more effective rotations of crops. At the heart of the process were sharp increases in grain yields. The average oat yields in a sample of counties in the 1790s were around 10 to 13, more than triple late seventeenth-century returns. As the agricultural reporter William Fullarton noted in some astonishment of Ayrshire in 1793, ‘the third of the farms in crop supplied double or treble the yield which had formerly been taken from the whole’.20

The key to this new agriculture was the more intensive application of traditional methods, such as fallowing and the lavish application of lime, coupled with the more ‘modern’ and innovative use of sown grasses and turnip husbandry. In the old system, regular cultivation had been confined to the relatively small area of the infield because of the limited supply of manure. Sown grasses, such as clover, dramatically increased the amount of fodder, allowed more beasts to be kept and produced more dung to be spread as fertiliser. By 1800, according to the Statistical Account, the majority of farms in the central and eastern Lowlands were using rotations incorporating sown grasses. Turnips were less common in the later eighteenth century, but in the long run they were to have even greater impact. For the first time they provided a heavy feeding crop which could be eaten on the fields. It therefore became possible even for farms that specialised in grain production to bring in animals from outside to be fattened and at the same time fertilise the arable land. It was a virtuous circle in which more beasts producing more dung added to the productivity of the soil, on which still more fodder crops could be cultivated. The system particularly appealed in Scotland, which, for reasons of climate and terrain, had tended to be more committed to pastoral husbandry. Now the areas of hill country and cattle and sheep farming were combined effectively with the lower-lying districts of arable agriculture. Particularly in areas north of the Tay and across the north-east counties of Banff, Kincardine and Aberdeen, turnip husbandry and cattle fattening became the primary foundations of the new system.

The continued drive for profit and ever more efficient methods of working the land also had profound human consequences. Apart from the new, lighter two-horse ploughs pioneered by James Small and others and the threshing machine, invented in 1787, new technology was of little relevance to the agricultural revolution before 1850. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did the coming of the mechanical reaper and other labour-saving devices affect some areas of farm work. Before then all tasks of the farm depended on exhausting human effort: the daily drudgery of clearing the land, sowing, ploughing, reaping, weeding, gathering, milking, lifting and a host of other jobs. There was, therefore, a major drive to increase the productivity of labour by altering traditional habits of working and transforming the social position of entire social groups in the rural communities. All of this, the Improving writers argued, would produce material benefits in the long-run. In the short-term, however, these drastic social changes must also have made life harder and less secure for many on the land.21

The trend pre-1760 to single-tenant farms now accelerated as the remaining multiple tenancies were eliminated and many individual holdings were brought together under one farmer. In addition, an even more radical development ran parallel with the consolidation of farms. The cottar system of allocating small patches of land in return for labour services came under widespread attack. The dispossession of the cottars was deeply significant, as in several districts in the Lowlands they had comprised between one-third and one-half of the total number of inhabitants. Fundamentally, this ancient structure was in conflict with the new agrarian order. The old system was well suited to a regime where demand for labour tended to concentrate in brief periods in the year around tasks such as grain-harvesting and fuel-gathering. It was useful in these circumstances for farmers to have a reliable pool of labour which could be called upon in busy seasons and then laid off without any cash cost until required again. However, the needs of improved agriculture were different. The more intensive cultivation of the land, thorough ploughing, the adoption of new crops and of innovative rotations ensured that the working year started to lengthen. There was, on the whole, an evening out rather than an accentuation of seasonal labour requirements within mixed farming. Inevitably, this development favoured the hiring of full-time workers. These were sometimes married servants hired by the year but, more commonly, in most districts, were single male and female servants employed for six months. Only these groups were suited to the regular toil increasingly carried out in improved Lowland farms. Ironically, the married-servant class was similar to the cottars in several respects. They obtained a house, garden, fuel, the keep of a cow and other privileges as part of the wage reward. The crucial difference, however, was that they were full-time workers, entirely under the masters’ control during their term of employment, and could be dismissed at the end of it.22

This position of subordination was crucial. While the independence of cottars can be exaggerated – they did possess land, but only in mere fragments, and they had to obtain work in larger holdings in order to make ends meet – they were obviously less subject to the discipline of the masters than full-time servants. But the new agriculture demanded much higher levels of labour efficiency. Tenants were under pressure from two sources. First, landowners were forcing up rentals in dramatic fashion, and, second, wages of agricultural workers were also rising from the 1770s, and especially from the 1790s, as industrial and urban expansion lured many from the country districts to the towns. One important response was the enforcement of policies designed to enhance the productivity of labour. The removal of the cottars can be seen in this context. In the most improved districts, where the old Scots plough was being replaced by James Small’s plough, using a team of one man and two horses, the clearest effect can be seen. Gradually the whole work routine centred on boosting the efficiency of the horses. Hours of labour and number of workers were closely related to the number of horse teams and their workrate. Ploughmen took responsibility for a particular pair, and their entire routine from early morning to evening was devoted to the preparation, working and final grooming of the animals. This system required that the ploughmen be permanent servants, boarded within the farm steading or in a cottage adjacent or close to their animals. The part-time labours of the cottars were now redundant as it became possible to tailor requirements to the numbers actually required for specific farm tasks.23

The continued contraction in size of the tenant-farming class as a result of consolidation and the removal of the cottars (which was all but complete in most areas by the 1820s) created an entirely new social order, in which only a tiny minority of the population had rights to land. The single exception in the Lowlands was the counties of the north-east region, where the development of crofting from the 1790s maintained the land connection for many well into the later nineteenth century. Elsewhere, landlessness was predominant.24 In the agricultural communities a small number of rent-paying farmers, holding a lease for a given period, employed landless servants and labourers who were dependent entirely on selling their labour power. The sheer scale and speed of social and economic change in the Scottish countryside in this period is remarkable and is probably unique in a European context at this time. By the 1840s, improved agriculture had triumphed throughout the Lowlands, and Scottish farming, criticised for its backwardness in earlier years, had now become internationally renowned as a model of efficiency for others to follow. The historiography of the other major Scottish region, the Highlands, is quite different in tone and emphasis.

THE HIGHLANDS: CRISIS AND CLEARANCE

There is a long tradition in Scottish history of treating the Highlands as a case apart. Poor natural endowment, the survival of a tribal clan-based social system into the eighteenth century and a land where the people spoke Gaelic rather than English all suggest that the region was different. In some ways, indeed, it might be argued that the Highlands became even more obviously idiosyncratic during the age of transformation after c. 1750. While the Lowlands prospered and flourished on account of industrialisation and improved farming, the Highlands can be depicted as a region of failure, as self-evident proof that economic growth does not necessarily result in change for the better in all areas. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Highlands suffered the trauma of widespread eviction of local communities (the Clearances), mass emigration and, in the 1840s, large-scale famine, which for a time threatened many thousands with starvation. The analytical issue for the historian of the Highlands tends to focus not on the reasons for success but on the causes of failure.25

From another perspective, however, and especially when the eighteenth-century evidence is considered, there were some striking similarities with the patterns already described for the Lowlands. True, the south and east of Scotland did not have to endure the punitive measures imposed by the British state on the Gaels after the failure of the last Jacobite rebellion in 1746. That apart, however, the main reasons for economic and social change were common to both the Highlands and Lowlands. Furthermore, as will be shown below, the Highland region responded positively at first to the new opportunities. Down to the early nineteenth century there seemed good cause for optimism.

Like the Lowlands, significant changes were already underway before the 1750s. Clanship was not frozen in time. Where commercial relationships were developing, the increased marketing of black cattle, fish, and timber was proceeding apace and the new consumerism of the clan elites was becoming ever more manifest.26 Again, in the Highlands as elsewhere in Scotland, the urban and industrial markets were the powerful engines of more fundamental change after c. 1760. Demand for traditional staples boomed. Cattle prices quadrupled in the course of the eighteenth century and total exports of cattle from the region probably quintupled. In Argyll and, albeit to a lesser extent, further north, commercial fishing of herring became even more significant with, for example, some 600–800 boats engaged annually in Loch Fyne alone. Due to changes in government revenue legislation and enhanced Lowland markets, demand increased persistently for illicit whisky, and the exploitation of Highland slate quarries at Easdale and Ballachulish and elsewhere, and of woodland on many estates, continued apace. Textile production began to expand in Highland Perthshire, Argyll and eastern Inverness and in parts of Ross and Cromarty and Sutherland, and the production of linen cloth stamped for sale in the Highland counties rose steadily, from 21,972 yards in 1727–8 to 202,006 yards by 1778.

Southern industrialisation had an insatiable appetite for Highland raw materials in the later eighteenth century and thereafter, with wool being in special demand. The Lowland cotton industry quicldy achieved abundant supplies of raw fibre from the Caribbean and then from the southern USA, but it was more difficult for the woollen manufacturers. Overseas supply from Europe was limited and erratic during the Napoleonic Wars and it was only when Australia started to export in volume from the 1820s that overseas sources became really significant. In the interim, the gap was increasingly filled by Highland sheep farmers. In 1828 Scottish wool accounted for just under 10 per cent of UK output and for 25 per cent by the early 1840s.27

Equally significant for a time, though in different ways, was the manufacture of kelp, a calcined seaweed extract used in the manufacture of soap and glass. Industrial demand grew, not least because cheaper and richer sources of foreign barilla were curtailed during the French Wars and kelp production seemed well suited to the western Highlands and Islands, where the raw material was abundant. A cheap and plentiful supply of labour was vital since the process of production, though essentially a simple one, was very arduous with a ratio of one ton of kelp to 20 tons of collected seaweed. Kelp manufacture began in the west in the 1730s but not until after 1750 did it really begin to take hold: 2,000 tons per annum output were reached in the 1770s and 5,000 in 1790, and thereafter the industry boomed, achieving a peak production in 1810 of about 7,000 tons. By that date its main centres had become clearly established as the Uists, Barra, Harris, Lewis, Skye, Tiree and Mull, and on the mainland there was also considerable activity in Ardnamurchan and Morvern. To a considerable extent, however, kelp production was concentrated in the Hebrides, especially in the Long Island; and there it had profound social consequences.

These responses to external markets give the lie to any suggestion that the Highlands were a conservative society, wedded to tradition and incapable of dynamic change.28 In fact, the pace of development was actually faster in Gaeldom than elsewhere in Scotland as traditional society moved from tribalism to capitalism over less than two generations. The unprecedented rise in rentals – Skye rents trebled between 1775 and 1800 while those in some Wester Ross estates jumped tenfold over the period 1776 to 1805 – confirms that regional income was rising sharply. The Highlands, were achieving a comparative advantage in the production of wool, mutton, fish, whisky, slate and kelp. Significant gains in productivity in key sectors can also be identified. The big sheep ranches of the north-west were the equals of the Lothians farms in their efficiency. The carcass weight of the beasts increased by an average of 60 per cent between 1799 and 1884, while the fleece weight was reckoned to have doubled between the 1790s and 1830s.29

Moreover, Highland lairds seemed little different from Lowland proprietors in their enthusiastic embrace of Improvement. Recent research has shown, for instance, how active the Highland élites were in profit-making across the Empire in the East and West Indies and the American colonies, and how much of this capital was channelled home to support ambitious schemes of Improvement on family estates.30 As in the Lowlands, farm reorganisation and tenurial change were also at the heart of the revolution. In the southern, central and eastern Highlands the innovations were a mirror-image of these which took place elsewhere in Scotland. Individual family farms of around 40 to 60 acres were created out of the old communal townships. Each had its complement of servants and labourers engaged in mixed husbandry. Large cattle and sheep farms existed throughout the region but the smaller holdings were more representative. Another key feature of many parishes here was the successful development of local non-agricultural activities, such as the booming herring fishery of the Argyll sea lochs and the linen manufacturers of Highland Perthshire. By and large, though life was hard, the region was one of modest comfort and economic resilience which managed to escape the disasters which were to overwhelm the rest of the Highlands later in the nineteenth century.31

Along the western seaboards of Inverness-shire and Rosshire and the coasts of Sutherland, and including most of the inner and outer Hebrides, a quite different social order was taking shape amid the ruins of the traditional society. Over great tracts of the region, especially on the mainland before 1815, but extending over the islands in subsequent decades, large grazing farms devoted to the raising of Blackface and Cheviot sheep became dominant. But although the advance of pastoral husbandry caused immense social disruption and the clearance of many communities, it did not often result in this period in planned and overt expulsion of the inhabitants. Instead, relocation (and especially relocation in crofting townships) was the favoured policy, so that profit could be extracted both from the labour-intensive activities of the crofters and from the more extensive operations of the big flock-masters.

Thus, over less than two or three generations, as the joint tenancies were destroyed, the crofting system was imposed throughout the region. By the 1840s, at least 86 per cent and in most parishes 95 per cent of holdings were rented at £20 or less. These small tenancies, only a few acres in size, were laid out in ‘townships’ or crofting settlements and had certain common features because they were the product of an ‘Improving’ philosophy which was enforced by virtually all landowners in these districts. At the core was the arable land, divided into a number of separate smallholdings, and these were surrounded by grazing or hill pasture which was held in common by the tenants of the township. The most striking feature, however, was that the croft was not designed to provide a full living for the family. Sir John Sinclair reckoned that the typical crofter had to be able to obtain at least 200 days of additional work outside his holding in order to avoid chronic destitution. Crofts were in fact reduced in size in order to force the crofter and his family into other employments. The holding itself should provide only partial subsistence and, to make ends meet and afford the rental, the crofter and his family had to have recourse to supplementary jobs.

These non-agricultural tasks were usually seasonal in nature. The crofting system provided a convenient source of subsistence for a reserve army of labour that was required only at certain times of the year. Crofting, therefore, became the sine qua non for the rapid expansion of kelp manufacture (in which between 25,000 and 40,000 people were seasonally employed during the peak summer months in the Hebrides), for fishing and for illicit whisky-making. Crofts were also used to attract recruits to the family regiments of the landowners, with tiny areas of land being promised in return for service. Throughout the process of transforming the joint tenancies into crofts there was one fundamental guiding principle: too much land would act as a distraction from other, more profitable tasks. The crofters were to be labourers first and agriculturists only second. In retrospect, this proved a disastrous policy for the people of the western Highlands and Islands.

Essentially, the whole social system of the region became bound up with the success of the by-employments which flourished down to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. But in the main these activities were ephemeral because, like kelp manufacture and military service, they often existed only on the basis of the transitory conditions of wartime. Moreover, in their heyday they had little positive effect on the crofting economy. Kelp, for instance, was noted for its volatile prices, but, because of the great market expansion of the 1790s, became the principal economic activity in the Western Isles by 1815. But the working population gained little from this short-term bonanza as landlords in the kelp islands achieved monopoly control over the manufacture and marketing of the commodity and the ‘earnings’ of the labour force were mainly absorbed by increased rentals, rising population and annual payments to proprietors for meal.

Because of the labour needs of so many activities, most landlords were content for a time to see the unregulated division of lands among cottars and squatters. But this pulverising of the holdings helped to tie the people to the land and, unlike the pattern in the south and east Highlands and the Lowlands, inhibited permanent migration. The impact of these policies can be clearly seen in the demographic statistics. Between 1801 and 1841 along the western seaboard and the islands, population increased by 53 per cent, while in the south and eastern Highlands, as a consequence of much higher levels of out-migration, the average was around 7 per cent. This was a key factor in that region’s economic and social resilience. The reckless process of subdivision elsewhere also depended on an equally rapid increase in potato cultivation. Potatoes had been grown in the early eighteenth century but by 1750 were still relatively uncommon. It was only where the croft became dominant that potatoes became a central part in the diet, and during the crofting revolution of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries cultivation expanded on a remarkable scale. The transformation of land structures and the adoption of the potato went hand in hand. Because of its very high yield, the potato became the key source of support for the dense communities of crofters, cottars and squatters that were building up to service kelp and fishing.32

The final failure of the potatoes in 1846 and for several years afterwards, was the catalyst for a mass exodus from the crofting region. Around a third of the population left between 1841 and 1861.33 Starvation was avoided by state and charitable intervention but the mass clearances of destitute crofters and cottars and ‘assisted’ schemes of emigration to the New World accelerated on an unprecedented scale. The optimism and hopes for Improvement of the later eighteenth century lay in ruins. Instead, the Highlands became a ‘problem’ region where economic transformation had brought distress rather than benefit. This seemed all the more puzzling to contemporary observers, given some of its advantages for development. The Highlands possessed an expanding and cheap labour force, was surrounded by seas that were rich in fish and the potential of the region as a major source of raw materials had been amply demonstrated before 1815. The possibilities for capital accumulation were also very great because so much of the area’s principal asset, land, was concentrated among a small group of proprietors. The Highlands were one of the few parts of Britain where, because of their strategic importance as a source of soldiers and sailors, the state invested on a considerable scale through the Commission for Annexed Forfeited Estates, the British Fisheries Society and an ambitious programme of road and bridge building in the early nineteenth century. But all this was to no avail; there was little long-term impact.34

Some blame the landowners for failure. Resolving that complex and emotive question is difficult because, as recent work has shown, the landed class was far from monolithic and strategies varied significantly. Some proprietors did try to fund fishing and industrial development while others were much less proactive and squandered their rental incomes outside the Highlands. On the other hand, money also poured into the region as new owners replaced most of the old élites.35 The problem was that even the most imaginative schemes seemed to have little effect in the long-term. It should also be remembered that the region’s landowners faced more formidable obstacles than their fellows elsewhere in Britain – above all, the poor quality of land, which inhibited the development of labour-absorbing arable farming and hence virtually forced the region’s economy in the direction of large-scale pastoral farming, where the western Highlands did indeed have a comparative advantage. This response had an inherent economic rationality but had a devastating impact on the welfare of the people.

Whatever the truth of the matter, even the most determined and costly scheme of landlord investment was probably doomed to failure by the end of the Napoleonic Wars.36 By then the north-west was virtually locked into an economic vice that was contracting inexorably. There were at least four major problems. First, by 1815 commercial forces had transformed the region into an economic enclave of British industry. In essence it had become a satellite, with its functions utterly subordinate to the production of foodstuffs, raw materials and labour for the southern cities. No longer were the people of the western Highlands dependent only on the climate, the price of cattle and the returns from the land; their fate was now also inextricably bound up with the fluctuation of distant markets for a range of commodities. Second, commercialisation had fashioned an insecure and vulnerable economic structure, centred on crofting, the potato and by-employments; and at the same time much grazing land, vital in the old society, had been absorbed by the new sheep farms, which also tended to channel most of their economic gains out of the region. Third, the Highlands, as an integral part of the British market economy, was fully exposed to the direct impact of competition from advanced centres of industry such as the west of Scotland and the north of England. The Highlands lacked coal reserves of any significance, had few towns and, like other British peripheral regions such as the west of Ireland and the south-east of England, its small-scale textile industries were soon remorselessly squeezed by competition from the manufacturing heartlands. It was forced to specialise in sectors where it had a comparative advantage within the new economic system, and these were confined largely to sheep farming and the provision of casual labour for the Lowland economy.

Fourth, the postwar recession spelt impending death for many of the by-employrnents which had allowed the crofters to scratch a living in previous years. Most areas of the British economy experienced some difficulty in the years after 1815, but in the north and west the outcome was disastrous. This was partly because in a recession peripheral areas tended to suffer worst, but it was also because so much of the Highland boom was due to ephemeral wartime conditions, and much of the region’s export economy fell apart with the coming of peace. Cattle prices halved between 1810 and 1830. Fishing stagnated, due to the erratic migrations of the herring in the western sea lochs, the withdrawal of bounties on herring in the 1820s and the decline of the Irish and Caribbean markets for cured herring. Kelp, the great staple of the Hebrides, suffered even more acutely when peace brought revived imports of foreign barilla, a cheaper and richer substitute. The reduction of the duty on foreign alkali combined with the discovery that cheaper alkali could be extracted from common salt also had a devastating effect. The price of kelp had already halved by 1820 and it fell further in later years. The coming of peace also led to the demobilisation of the vast number of Highlanders who had joined the army and navy, and before long even illicit whisky-making was also under severe pressure as a result of radical changes in revenue legislation in the 1820s. That decade was indeed a grim one for the people of the western Highlands as virtually the whole economic fabric which had been built up between 1760 and 1815 disintegrated. Even more ominously, though sheep prices stagnated they did not experience the collapse of other commodities: to many observers only commercial pastoralism, with all its implication for further clearance and dispossession, had a real future.

The profound economic weaknesses of the western Highlands and Islands were cruelly exposed when the potatoes failed in 1846. The blight lasted to a greater or lesser extent for almost a decade and had a devastating impact on the region. An Irish-type mortality disaster was indeed averted by charitable intervention, landlord assistance and some state aid. But the consequences of the potato failure were still traumatic. Destitution intensified and the bankruptcy of the small tenants triggered a new wave of clearances, especially in the Hebrides. Above all, a huge stimulus was given to mass emigration.37 The Highland tragedy confirmed the uneven impact of the Agricultural Revolution in Scotland.

FLUCTUATING FORTUNES, 1850–1900

The 1850s and 1860s were in most years decades of prosperity in Scottish agriculture. Even in the Highlands, the catastrophes of the 1840s were followed from c. 1856 by an era of relative stability and recovery as cattle prices rose, the regional white and herring fishery enjoyed unprecedented expansion and temporary migration for work in southern industry, construction and farming assumed even greater significance.38 Indeed, all sectors of the rural economy in Scotland responded to the escalating demand for food, drink and raw materials from the vast expansion of towns and cities whose needs could not yet be satisfied on any significant scale from overseas suppliers. In the 1840s under a third of the nation lived in urban areas of 5,000 or above. Thereafter, city and town growth was continuous and unrelenting. Scotland became the second most urbanised country in the world after England as the urban share of national population doubled between 1831 and 1911. By the latter year, 60 per cent of all Scots lived in towns of 5,000 or more inhabitants.39

Underpinning this market expansion was a parallel revolution in transport. The combination of the railway and the steamship had a decisive effect and the great potential of Scotland as a great cattle-fattening and breeding country was finally realised. Cattle intended for the English market had in earlier times to be sold lean to the drovers who took them south on the hoof. Then in the 1820s came the steamships followed in the 1850s by the railways, which opened up the huge London market to Scottish fat cattle. The most spectacular gains were achieved in the north-east which rapidly became a specialist centre of excellence for the production of quality meat. By 1870 beef from the region carried the highest premium in London markets. The Aberdeen Angus, developed by William McCombie of Tillyfour farm, evolved into a breed of world-wide reputation.40 The railways also enabled the perishable products of milk and buttermilk to be brought into the expanding cities from further afield while affording farmers the enhanced opportunity to import feeding stuffs and fertilisers in huge quantity like guano and industrial phosphates. The result was even higher yields. Steam power was now used more for threshing, and by the 1870s the greater part of the grain and hay crop was being mechanically harvested in most areas of the Lowlands.41 The