Highland Clearances

The Highland Clearances (Scottish Gaelic: Fuadach nan Gàidheal, the "eviction of the Gael") was the eviction, mostly during the 18th and 19th centuries, of a significant number of tenants in the Scottish Highlands. It resulted from enclosures of common lands and a change from farming to sheep raising, an agricultural revolution largely carried out by hereditary aristocratic landowners. The Clearances were a complex series of events occurring over more than a hundred years. A Highland Clearance has been defined as "an enforced simultaneous eviction of all families living in a given area such as an entire glen".

The Clearances relied on the insecurity of tenure of most tenants under the Scottish legal system. There was no equivalent of the English system of copyhold, which provided a heritable tenancy for many English counterparts of the Scots who were cleared from their farms. The cumulative effect of the Clearances, and the large-scale voluntary emigrations over the same period, devastated the cultural landscape of Scotland; the effect of the Clearances was to destroy much of the Gaelic culture.

The Clearances resulted in significant emigration of Highlanders to the coast, the Scottish Lowlands, and further afield to North America and Australasia. In the early 21st century, many times more descendants of Highlanders are found in these diaspora destinations than in Scotland.

The enclosures in rural England in the British Agricultural Revolution started much earlier, during the Tudor period. Similar developments in Scotland have lately been called the Lowland Clearances by historians such as Tom Devine. But in the Highlands, the impact on a Goidelic (Scottish Gaelic)-speaking semi-feudal culture, which had included the fulfilment of obligations of a chief to his clan, led to vocal campaigning against the actions. There has been a lingering bitterness among the descendants of those forced to emigrate or to remain in crofting townships on very small areas of poor farming land.

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