The Politics of Highland Improvement
Annexation and the Landed Estate in Scotland, 1747-1784
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Publishing:31st Jan '27
£100.00
This title is due to be published on 31st January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This book studies attempts to ‘improve’ land and livelihoods in the post-Culloden Highlands. Its starting point is the Jacobite rising of 1745, which led to the forfeiture and then annexation of thirteen Highland landed estates between 1747 and 1784 by the Hanoverian state. The period of annexation would enshrine many of the features that came to characterise the Highlands over the next hundred years, from crofting tenure to increasingly privatised estate landscapes. Replacing the Highland tenantry at the centre of the processes of land improvement and uncovering fresh perspectives on themes such as mapping, crofting, gendered labour and rural resistance, the book explores the ways the Highland landed estate and, by extension, the Highland region, was used as a laboratory to experiment with ideas about social, cultural and economic improvement. It also traces how these ideas were then shaped, negotiated and contested by estate residents.
An outstanding and much-needed re-assessment of the eighteenth-century Highlands. Juliette Desportes meticulously analyses the experimental and often contradictory nature of the Government’s post-Culloden ‘improvement’ policies, providing important new insights into later Highland history, while challenging many existing preconceptions – not least the Highlander as ‘passive victim’. -- David Taylor, Independent Researcher and Historian
The Politics of Highland Improvement provides a comprehensive and superbly-argued analysis of why the Board of Trustees or Commissioners for the Annexed Estates (1755-84) failed in their ambitious plan to transform the Highlands through reform and improvement in the decades after Culloden. The Board’s struggle to adequately survey the confiscated estates, to establish crofting as a solution, to spread the spinning of flax, or to deal with the disputes and petitions that arose from the endless contestations over who had a right to land are all explored in a text that is full of fresh data and insights. Why the Board failed is touched upon throughout but its inability ‘to find a definitive purpose’ and the fact that it preferred to ‘govern by the pen’ from Edinburgh are seen as key factors. For those who want to understand the Highlands in the decades after Culloden, this is a must-read text. -- Robert Dodgshon, Aberystwyth University
ISBN: 9781399556729
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
272 pages