This article reassesses a major and controversial field, and its remit dictates its length. Firstly, it reviews the scholarship of the Highland Clearances (c.1760–1860) and Land Agitation (1870s/80s) since the 1970s. Secondly, and building on the cultural turn identified in the more recent scholarship, it argues for the primary importance not of demography or economy but ideology: the Clearances and Land Agitation as at root a clash between the political economy and a Gaelic ethical worldview or system which embodied a social contract and bears analogy with E. P. Thompson’s ‘moral economy’. For all that their collision is taken to explain the peculiar intensity of the Highland Clearances, political economy and Gaelic moral economy are not considered as monolithic or mutually exclusive, and allusions are made to a ‘third way’ never taken. Recovering and centring the Gaelic moral economy allows for a more holistic envisioning of the period from within and without, and depends upon proper engagement with Gaelic and Gaelic-derived sources: oral tradition, the evidence given to the Napier Commission (1883–4) and especially Gaelic poetry and song, the last treated here as both a living archive of Gaelic ethics maintained by the poets, and a seismograph of social change. Finally, the article draws on the cultural turn and Gaelic sources to reappraise Clearance and post-Clearance society, represented here by proprietors and tacksmen above, the middling factorial class, and ‘the people below’. Human relationships within and across these social strata are reconsidered, and human behaviour evaluated to acknowledge diversity born of personality and place, and spectrums of behaviour. Acknowledgement is also made of Gaelic participation and agency at all social levels, and on both sides of the mooted ideological divide.
Martin MacGregor (Sat,) studied this question.