Highland Clearing (2019)

Book Review from the December 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Clans and Clearance. The Highland Clearances Volume One. By Alwyn Edgar. Theory and Practice. 2019.

In his introduction to this 700-page tome, Alwyn Edgar explains that he first became interested over fifty years ago in the Scottish Highlands and how they came to be depopulated but that he has only now got round to turning his research and notes into a book. Four more volumes are to follow.

In this volume he examines the origin and nature of the clan system as it existed up until 1750 and exposes some of the popular misconceptions about it, for instance that it was overpopulation that led to the later mass emigration from the area to the slums and industries of Glasgow and to North America and New Zealand and that the highlanders were Catholics (he produces figures to show that they were 96 percent Protestant).

We will have to wait for Volume Three to see his analysis of the clearances in the first half of the nineteenth-century by the Duchess of Sutherland, notorious throughout the world thanks to Marx’s mention of them in chapter 27 of Capital on ‘The Expropriation of the Agricultural Population’ as an example of what was required to allow capitalist development to take off.