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The case of Glasgow
Every county in Britain had its problems, but nowhere were they as great as in Glasgow. Fever mortality was higher than any other comparable city in Britain. The main killer was typhus (or ‘Irish’ fever, as it was popularly known). By 1835, more than 50 per cent of the admissions to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary were suffering from typhus, whereas in 1815 that number had been only 10 per cent.
But in the face of these appallingly high death rates, Glasgow’s population continued to grow faster in times of economic distress than when the economy was doing well. As employment in agriculture fell, people had no choice but to move to the cities for work. Things weren’t any better in the cities, but at least there was the prospect of work and wages. Glasgow soaked up displaced Highlanders and the Irish, both of whom had a higher birth rate than the locals.
The horrendous social circumstances didn’t go u
Not everyone was concerned about the high death rates. Some people believed that the high death rates were nature’s way of bringing population in line with resources. Instead of poor relief, the middle classes offered the poor churches and schools; instead of sanitation, they were lectured on the follies of intemperance and vice. The solution to the urban crisis, which involved a sea-change in attitudes, was a long way off in Glasgow and other towns in Scotland.
The Highland Clearances: Ethnic Cleansing of the Highlands
On 16 April 1745 at Culloden Moor above Inverness, about 8,000 of the duke of Cumberland’s soldiers defeated a smaller number of Highland clansmen in one hour, killing about 1,500 of them. Both sides thought history was in the making, but it was the Hanoverians who triumphed. For the Highlands, it was symbolic of radical changes already long underway (see Chapter 12), but in the next few decades the
Gàidhealtachd
(Gaeldom) would be transformed out of all recognition.
The occupation of the Highlands by Cumberland, ‘the butcher of the Scots’, was brutal. Invergarry Castle was razed to the ground, and lootings and indiscriminate attacks were carried out on the people. Because the Young Pretender was never captured, those suspected of harbouring him or aiding his escape were singled out for particularly harsh punishment.
There was also the suppression of Highland culture. Kilt wearing and bagpipe playing were ba
However, it was not all suppression and intimidation. There was also an attempt to incorporate the Highlands into mainstream British society by the establishment of military regiments, such as the Camerons, Frasers and Seaforths. Between 1797 and 1837, the Isle of Skye alone provided 21 lieutenant generals and major generals; 48 lieutenant colonels; 600 majors, captains and ensigns; and 1,000 soldiers for the British army; plus a governor general of India and 4 other colonial governors. The Highland regiments fought with distinction during the wars against the French in such far-flung places as North America and on the battlefields of Europe. It was estimated that a quarter of Highland men of military age were serving in the armed forces between 1792 and 1815. The Highland soldier became an iconic image of the military spirit.
The drainage of Highland men into the army during the American Revolution was part of what is known as the Highland Clearances. This was supplemented by emigration – some 15,000 Highlanders left between 1770 and 1815 for British North America. But these departures were voluntary. There were also forced Clearances on the estates of men such as Alexander MacDo
From the 1790s, the landlords began to oppose emigration for one very good reason: greed. Clan relations were increasingly based on commerce rather than blood. The Highland chiefs had been sucked into Lowland society and the rich life, which had to be paid for. Their clan members became a source of income rather than kin. As a result, labour-intensive communities were established in coastal areas harvesting kelp (seaweed), which was processed and then used in candle- and soap-making.
Because it brought enormous profits for the chiefs, people had to be tied to the land. In 1803, the chiefs successfully persuaded the government to pass the rather i
The landlords were less enthusiastic about retaining their people when the French wars came to an end with the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. The end of war saw the boom times disappear. Cattle and sheep prices declined, military recruitment slumped and the bottom fell out of the market for kelp. During the good times, the tenants had borrowed heavily and had run up substantial arrears; in the depression that followed, they couldn’t pay their rents. As rental incomes began to fall, the landlords were facing bankruptcy. It was a case of, ‘You or me, mate!’
A ‘final solution’ was arrived at to clear the estates of the unsupportable population. The best-known example of this was the Clearances that took place on the Sutherland estates between 1811 and 1821. Some 6,000 to 10,000 people were relocated to coastal areas and provided with a small plot of land known as a
croft,
which barely gave the
crofters
and their families enough to live on, so they had to labour at fishing and kelping for the landlord. The lands that they were evicted from in Strathnaver and the Strath of Kildonan were turned over to sheep.
The evictions were brutally carried out. People had their homes torched. At the township of Rosal, Donald Macleod, a Sutherland crofter, said: ‘The conflagration lasted six days, till the whole of the dwellings were reduced to ashes or smoking ruins.’
On 13 June 1814, Patrick Sellar, estate manager for the Sutherlands, was involved in the eviction of William Chisholm and his wife from their croft. During the eviction, the roof was set on fire, with Chisholm’s mother-in-law, Margaret Mackay, still inside. Margaret was rescued by her daughter, but she died five days later. Sellar was put on trial at Inverness in April 1816 for acts of gross inhumanity, including culpable homicide. Tried by a jury of landowners from outside Sutherland, he was – surprise, surprise – completely exonerated!
But Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, was not the only evictor. There were others, including the earl of Breadalbane in Glenorchy, Lord MacDonald on Skye and Maclean of Duart. Landlords who were moved to compassion for their tenants and who tried not to evict or offered relief projects went bankrupt – for example, Clanranald on South Uist and MacLeod of Dunvegan.
The problem for the Highland economy was that, during the French wars, it had become more firmly linked with the demands of Lowland and English markets. These markets disappeared after 1815. Falling back on the produce of their crofts, the Highlanders became increasingly dependent on the potato for survival – with disastrous results in the 1840s (see Chapter 14).
Empire and Diaspora
The Highland regiments and their fighting prowess did a lot to further British interests throughout the globe. They were the shock troops of British imperialism. But symbolically, they also demonstrated the extent to which the region had been integrated into the economy and society of Britain and its empire.
Indeed, the Highlanders’ service to the empire allowed many former Jacobites to rehabilitate themselves as staunch Unionists. Fraser of Lovat, for instance, offered to raise a regiment of 2,000 men when war broke out in America in 1775. The existence of kilted regiments allowed the Scots to feel they had a distinctive identity, but one that was not incompatible with Britishness.
But, of course, the Scots didn’t just make their mark as soldiers; they were also administrators, businessmen, educators and traders. The process of emigration had been well established before the ’45 and Scottish settlement had been established in North America and the West Indies for many years. The profits of slavery, tobacco and sugar had made the fortunes of some incredibly wealthy Scots and continued to do so until the abolition of slavery in 1807. But by that time, the focus of Scottish emigration was shifting from what had become the United States to Canada, and also much farther afield to the Indian subcontinent.
The Scots were unknown in India before 1707, but by the end of the century they were all out of proportion to their numbers. The Scottish presence had a lot to do with the appointment of Henry Dundas, ‘the uncrowned king of Scotland’, as first secretary of state for India. In 1783, he was responsible for bringing the private company that ran India – the East India Company (EIC) – under the supervision of Parliament. Dundas used his office to ‘Scoticise’ India. By 1792, Scots made up 1 in 9 EIC civil servants, 1 in 11 common soldiers and 1 in 3 officers. The first three governors general of India were Scottish. By 1813, 19 of Calcutta’s private merchant houses were dominated by them. From 1830 onward, Scots became involved as general merchants with Indian interests.
In 1821, Walter Scott observed that: ‘India is the corn chest for Scotland, where we poor gentry must send our younger sons as we send our black cattle to the south.’ He wasn’t far off the mark! People like John Farquhar from Aberdeenshire, an explosives manufacturer in Bombay, retired to an English mansion with £1 million. Soldiers also profited; for example, James Campbell, who had risen through the ranks to colonel, was able to return to Edinburgh’s New Town with a fortune of £25,000.
But it wasn’t all for profit. The Scots were genuinely interested in Indian culture and history. In 1791, William Robertson, professor of history at the University of Edinburgh, wrote one of the first major histories of India; John Gilchrist produced the first English–Hindustani dictionary. The Scots also took a softer line to Anglo–Indian relations than the English. Sir Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras, was convinced that the British should try to work with the Indians rather than against them and envisaged a future in which the Indians would be self-governing.