Debating the Highland Clearances

Book excerpt: Storm clouds always gather over the story of the Highland Clearances. The eviction of the Highlanders from the glens and straths of the Highlands and Islands of the north of Scotland still causes great historical dispute more than a century after the events. The Highland Clearances also generated a great deal of contemporary controversy and documentation. The record comes in diverse forms and with radically different provenances, offering excellent material for exercises in historical analysis and selection. Debating the Highland Clearances introduces the Highland Clearances as a classic historical problem. Eric Richards reviews the historical debate and examines the methods and sources employed by the combatants past and present. The debates among historians, novelists, politicians and economists are no less passionate today and raise major questions about interpretation and the appropriate frame of reference for the noisy and continuing public debate about the Highland Clearances. This book prese