Patrick Sellar and the Highland Clearances

"But while the clearances in Sutherland were at their height in the second decade of the 19th century, around 1815, the clearances of the late 1840s and early 1850s – in places like South Uist and Barra – were far worse in terms of sheer brutality. By that point the landowners had lost all conviction that there was any future for the people they were removing and they were just shovelling them out. The landlord of Barra, South Uist and Benbecula was a man called John Gordon of Cluny, who had bought the estate from the Clanranalds when they went bust in the 1830s. Gordon just wanted rid of people, and there was famine in the Highlands, just as in Ireland, in the 1840s, so people were leaving in appalling conditions and being shipped at his expense to Canada and dumped on the quayside. Canadian immigration officials, who were at that time dealing with the refugees from the Irish famine, said they’d never seen people in a worse state than the folk who came from the Uists. Some of them almost literally had no clothes. Well, it’s bound up with the much wider disintegration of the traditional society of the Highlands. There were all sorts of external forces operating on clanship long before the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, but with the defeat at Culloden in 1746 all of that accelerated, so you had the commercialization of agriculture and of the land structure, the former chieftains turned into landlords, and the whole society went into disintegration. So apart from the fact that people are being removed through brutality and hardship, there was a huge sense of cultural disorientation. One of the reasons that I recommended a couple of books by Eric Richards is that Richards is very good at highlighting the fact that there was nothing unique about this. That it was a manifestation, in the context of the Highlands and Islands, of something that was happening at the same time and has happened subsequently in many other parts of the world: the collision between modern, commercial capitalism and more traditional society. His book Patrick Sellar and the Highland Clearances is about a fascinating character. Sellar was one of the factors of the Sutherland estate and a sheep farmer himself. Sellar had a very well worked-out view as to what he was about. His justification was that he was bringing civilization and enlightenment to where previously there had only been darkness and barbarity. And that was exactly what people thought who were taking the British Empire into Africa, or American civilization across the prairies. Sellar made quite a bit of the fact that one of his own forebears had been a small crofter or peasant farmer in Morayshire and had been removed from the land. Sellar was a lawyer by profession and thought that he had, as it were, risen into the professional class as a result of what had happened to his grandfather or great-grandfather – that he had been kicked out of his croft. He thought, genuinely, I believe, that while what was happening to the people he was evicting might be harsh and horrible, they, or if not them then certainly their children and grandchildren, would actually thank him for it – for having spared them the horrors of continuing to be crofters in Sutherland!"