Talk:Highland Clearances

Whitewashing the Highland Clearances

I have problems with the denial to call the Highland Clearances ethnic cleansing. One can discuss long and broad the case of what where the reasons for the clearances. One can discus the motivations. Was the aim to clean out the highlanders and the argument is made for pure economics.

One can not discuss the result. A minority population in Britain, having a different culture, speaking a different language, adhering to a different church, was removed from their ancestral lands. Jochum (talk) 12:02, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

What was happening in the highlands was no different to what was happening all over Britain at the time. For example between 1770 and 1830, about 6 million acres of common land in England was enclosed. For centuries the poor of the countryside had the rights to graze their animals and grow their own produce on common land. With the removal of the common land many starved, were shipped to the colonies or migrated to the new industrial cities to provide cheap labour for the industrial revolution.The enclosed land was divided up among the large local landowners. Enclosure is a far less emotive word than clearance however the results were pretty much the same. Most of the land owners had inherited their land since the Norman conquest. The overwhelming majority of the poor did not have a Norman ancesters. If anything the blood ties between the landowners and their tenants in Scotland were stronger than their counterparts in England so I do not think you can call it ethnic cleansing. There is much discussion on this subject, whether it was good or bad most academics seem to conclude that clearing people off the land enriched the land owners. I think that in modern times the state and trade unions provide some protection to people, but if a company does not have any use for someone it fires them, so things have not changed as much as you think? Wilfridselsey (talk) 14:59, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

Welcome back, User:Jochum. The answer to this question is pretty much as before [1]. This article is about a historic event. Therefore the article content should reflect what the WP:RSs say. Per WP:HISTRS, those reliable sources should, in the main, be the works of academic historians. They do not characterise the Highland Clearances as ethnic cleansing. Therefore the article should not either.

I hope you find that the article makes clear that in the first phase of the Clearances, those who emigrated did so with the disapproval of their former landlords. Most landowners sought to retain displaced tenants on their land as people were then regarded as an asset. Those who emigrated were going against the landowner's wishes. In the second phase of the clearances, there were emigrants who were destitute because their method of making a living was no longer viable. The landowners paid the costs of that emigration in many cases. Throughout both of these phases, the overall population of the Highlands increased or stayed largely constant. The net fall in the Highland population came long after the clearances, in the early 20th century.

All this is against the background of the urban poor in Britain who also had no security of tenure in their lodgings. They too could be, and were, evicted on the whim of a landlord. User:Wilfridselsey's points on the fate of many other rural dwellers/workers is well made. As a modern-day equivalent, I used to live in a village where the largest landowner decided to move out of dairy farming, going over to beef. He therefore needed a smaller workforce. The head cowman was very upset to lose his job and his tied cottage. There was no way he could afford to live in the same community, even if another job was available. So he and his family had to move elsewhere. Those evicted in the Sutherland clearances fared better than this modern-day example, as they were offered homes in the same county with other members of their community moving to the same place.

If we are looking for ethnic cleansing, there was no attempt to eradicate the Gaelic-speaking population of the Highlands, or if there was it was a dramatic failure. We can see this from the census figures with the overall Highland population remaining consistent until the big falls in the 20th century. If we were to be respectful of those who went through the horrors of the break-up of Yugoslavia, when "ethnic cleansing" became more common in our vocabulary, it would seem sensible to restrict the term to situations that clearly fit the definition. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 19:14, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

I would say most academic sources do not support ethnic cleansing as a term applied to the clearances. An emotive subject for sure and certainly great hardship and suffering to those families at the time. However, a deliberate policy to exterminate an entire ethnic group in the context of what we have seen in the 20th century is hard to apply to the facts of the Scottish highlands, islands and of course the lowland clearances too. Coldupnorth (talk) 23:26, 30 October 2024 (UTC)