re: #216 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

So yes, the proximate cause were landlords trying to take more control over land, contra ancient clanship.

The clan chiefs mostly lived in the Lowlands in civilised places like Edinburgh and Stirling. They didn’t give much thought to the hardscrabble life of their serf-like tenants other than to pocket the rents their agents beat out of them.

But in 1707 Scotland and England united, and that meant the lords of Scotland had allegiance to the English crown.

Oh dear, I am beginning to understand why Irish folks have a real downer on American Plastic Paddies… The crowns of Scotland and England were united back in 1609 when James VI of Scotland inherited the English crown and became James VI and First. 1707 was the Union of Parliaments, a much more complicated thing which eventually led to the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

So maybe you can’t blame the English crown directly, but they seemed to care little about their new subjects while pressing the lords to pay.

There was no “English crown” by the time of the Clearances. There was the British crown, a national institution that had been passed around a couple of foreign aristocratic families (the House of Orange and the Hanovers) and politically neutered by Parliament over the century following the Union of Crowns. There had been two major rebellions started in the Highlands in 1715 and 1745, fomented and financed by the Papish French kings to put their hand-picked puppet on the British throne and do away with all that egalitarian democratic rule. The British Parliament decided it was time to bring the region into the eighteenth century, in part by building metalled roads into the Highlands and establishing large artillery parks and fortresses at their termini. Those roads made sheep more profitable than rebellious hardscrabble farmers and the Clearances thus started.