I visited the Scottish Highlands a few summers ago. What struck me most — more than the drama of shifting cloud and light or the wild and rugged hills bursting with purple heather — was the desolation. The Highlands are, largely, an uninhabited landscape. Here is a place, my tour guide remarked, where there are more sheep than people.
The Clearances were the deliberate, systematic, and forcible mass eviction of indigenous Gaelic-speaking crofters (tenant, subsistence farmers) from Highland and Island Scotland between the period of 1790 and 1855. Landlords sought agricultural improvement through enclosure, turning the land into profitable sheep farms and sporting estates. While some families relocated to newly planned industrial villages or continued farming on marginal lands, the vast majority of the population emigrated to the New World, particularly the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
This diasporic community is perhaps most visible and vibrant in Nova Scotia, where Gaelic-language retention is a government imperative and programs at academic institutions like Cape Breton University focus on Celtic expressive culture. Cape Breton was the destination of some 20,000 displaced Highlanders, and it is not surprising that its university’s press specializes in publications on the social and cultural impact of the Scottish diaspora. June Skinner Sawyer’s Bearing the People Away: The Portable Highland Clearances Companion is another valuable contribution in defining the global significance of this deeply disturbing moment in Scottish history.
Presented in an encyclopedic, reference-guide format, the book offers alphabetically arranged entries that focus on historical figures associated with the Clearances; relevant sites both within and outside Scotland; places, events, museums, and concepts associated with the topic; and artistic and literary expressions in response to the Clearances. Some entries are more thoroughly researched than others, and Skinner Sawyers tends to concentrate on the expressive culture resulting from the Clearances. She considers, for instance, the poetry of the Clearances (particularly during the nineteenth century) and contemporary Celtic musicians such as Runrig and Dougie Maclean whose music is infused with Gaelic and Highland motifs. She devotes a substantial number of paragraphs to cherished Canadian authors Alistair MacLeod and Hugh MacLennan, assessing their collection of work that deals with themes of home and displacement and whose characters “live in two worlds —the present of their Canadian home and the past of their Scottish ancestors” (157). The author also focuses on regions where exiled Scots settled, particularly North Carolina, Cape Breton and Pictou in Nova Scotia, and Glengarry County in Ontario.
Some entries are unexpected, and Skinner Sawyers has a knack for linking seemingly disparate topics to the Clearances or wider Highland culture. An entry on the “Lost Cause” seems a bit of a stretch, though the author convincingly connects aspects of America’s Civil War and the Fall of the Confederacy with the Highland Clearances. A “sensibility of defeat,” a penchant for fatalism, and a feeling of “otherness” within their own country links the two regions, and Bonnie Prince Charlie and Robert E. Lee become “opposite sides of the same coin” (136). Likewise, Skinner Sawyers parallels Native Americans and the Gaels, who both suffered land dispossession and are organized by similar social structures of clans and chiefdoms. Her entry on the controversial British fashion icon Alexander McQueen discusses how McQueen used fashion to comment on Scotland’s turbulent past. His “Highland Rape” collection (1995-96) of torn tartan and disheveled models was a statement on the Jacobite uprising and the Clearances as acts of violent aggression upon the nation. Skinner Sawyers also tackles more tricky terms and issues concerning the Clearances—an event that anthropologist Sharon MacDonald would label as “difficult history.” Genocide, racism, resistance (or lack of resistance), diaspora, romanticization, imagined pasts, the rule of landlords, Lowlander’s attitude toward Highlanders during the Clearances, Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic and stereotypes against Highland Catholics, and roots tourism are all broached.
The text lacks a satisfactory introduction that would offer a thorough overview of the Clearances and their social, economic, and political significance. Although a timeline of major events in Scottish history is presented, I was still left wondering what happened when and why. Richer detail of the Clearances is obviously offered throughout the various entries, but the reader must piece the narrative together. The map is also inadequate. Granted, the book is not so much an analytical text geared toward the academic reader as it is a general compendium. More thorough, comprehensive histories of the Clearances can be found elsewhere and the author offers an extensive reference list of such titles. Skinner Sawyers may be a popular writer, but she is well respected for her research on Highland culture. Bearing the People Away is not some heavy, shelvable title that encyclopedic formats usually take— and this is the book’s advantage. As the title claims, it is very “portable” and would be of use to researchers and travelers seeking contextual information before their visit to the Highlands or to regions of Scottish significance in the New World. It would also be useful to those teaching introductory courses in Celtic studies, Scottish ethnology, and regional studies. I do wonder, though, whether what is contained in the book could be as easily learned through a google.com search. Cape Breton University Press straddles the world of academic and regional, popular publishing. Such popular publications as Bearing the People Away are important for small university presses because they garner income to publish more limited-market academic works. I would like to see Cape Breton University Press begin publishing more critical, academia-focused titles.
So much romance and nostalgia surrounds Highland life and the Clearances that we lose sight of the scale of devastation, the brutality of injustice, and the hard yoke of oppression experienced by displaced Scots. Bearing the People Away is a good reminder of just how crucial an event the Highland Clearances actually were. Some scholars argue that they were an act of genocide or ethnic cleansing. Deep-seated Lowland and English prejudice labeled the Gael as indolent and lazy, a necessary casualty in the wake of agricultural improvement. But, as Skinner Sawyers cautions, we cannot dismiss the Clearances as some inevitable, albeit painful, result of progress. The Highland experience is much more than the romantic fodder of Queen Victoria or Sir Walter Scott. Bearing the People Away approaches the Clearances as not only raw historical experience but also as an image, concept, and symbol of profound importance in the Gaelic psyche. As a people who characteristically “don’t forget and don’t forgive,” the Clearances are experienced, remembered, and lamented by contemporary Scots within and without the diaspora, who shape their ethnic identity, in part, from this pivotal moment of Scottish history.
Many Scots exiles flourished in the New World as great nation builders, entrepreneurs, industrialists, craftsmen, and farmers. Canada, it is often said, is Scotland’s revenge on England. But these successes do not justify what was done to Gaelic people. As Skinner Sawyers maintains, the Clearances were “the most transformative event in Scottish history” and it is a story that “warrants retelling until its magnitude and sense of loss can be fully appreciated by everyone, especially those who know nothing or very little about it” (7). Bearing the People Away is a good entrée into this complex and compelling story.
--------
[Review length: 1201 words • Review posted on November 19, 2014]