AHC: Averting the Highland Clearances

With a Point of Divergence no earlier than 1700, is it possible to avert the large-scale eviction of the tenant farmers of the Scottish Highlands and concurrent breaking down of Gaelic social structures in a way allowing for the presence of a stronger Scottish Gaelic national identity in the present day?
 
With a Point of Divergence no earlier than 1700, is it possible to avert the large-scale eviction of the tenant farmers of the Scottish Highlands and concurrent breaking down of Gaelic social structures in a way allowing for the presence of a stronger Scottish Gaelic national identity in the present day?
No................
In the lowlands at least the transition from seudo tribal clan structures with their communal landownership and warrior/farmer/herder/crofter culture to proto-agricultural revolution methods and increasing resource extraction in the from of mining and quarrying activities was to far gone by that point. the highlands without the Bonnie prince business might have held on in some fashion until the late 1800 but the clearances (though through sponsored colonization or economic pressure) would still have happened as the English subverted the clan chiefs bringing the grouse and the sheep in instead of stubborn crofters who could not pay their rents due to crop failures or poor land/agricultural practices. After all the English had already broken one clan based culture in the Irish by this point and subjected the Welsh petty kingdoms to the same treatment so what would stop the red coats from doing the same to the highlanders? On a serious note recruitment to the Uk army would probably be raised along with the sound of Scottish Gaelic in the streets of various industrial towns and in the lowland farms and mines, alongside a steeper rate of emigration.
 
No. While you might be able to keep Gaelic stronger in the Highlands preserving the 1700 status quo is impossible, not least because the clansman will much prefer a 160 acre farm in Ontario to subsidence farming in an overcowded glen, permanently one bad harvest from starvation and sooner or later the powers of the clan chiefs to stop them leaving will be broken.
 
Makes sense enough. In that event, what sort of impetus would be needed in order to keep Gaelic presence stronger through the modern period? I guess some mitigation of the Highland Potato Famine would be one step, though I'm not sure how one would change the motivations of the central British government to do so.
 
Makes sense enough. In that event, what sort of impetus would be needed in order to keep Gaelic presence stronger through the modern period? I guess some mitigation of the Highland Potato Famine would be one step, though I'm not sure how one would change the motivations of the central British government to do so.

The motivation for the clearances was money. The (Scottish, BTW) landlords came to the conclusion that they could make more out of sheep than from tenants.
 
The motivation for the clearances was money. The (Scottish, BTW) landlords came to the conclusion that they could make more out of sheep than from tenants.
I understand that part; now I was more wondering what sort of conditions would be needed to maintain stronger Highlander presence, nonwithstanding the Clearances.
 
No Jacobite rebellions.

No Jacobite movement pulls forward the clearances by 50 years. Up until 1745 Clan Chiefs made money and gained status by selling military power to the Lowlands as they had done for centuries. The sooner you break that the sooner they'll move to replace large numbers of subsistence soldier/raider/farmers with smaller numbers of commercial farmers paying higher per acre rents.
That might be how you preserve Gaelic, if you make the transition earlier when Gaelic is stronger you might have an economically stronger and thus more stable 19th century Highlands with less population churn which preserves Gaelic.
 
You need a stronger state, and less dominance by the large landholders, which force a land reform through, where the tenants get ownership of their own land.

The Danish land reforms as example was heavily inspired by the Highland Clearance mostly in the state wanting avoid the Danish landholders doing something similar. This is a example of the state being in a stronger position against the large landholders.

The Highland Clearance and the Potato Famine are really good examples of why a Oligarchic Democracy often are worse for the common people than a Absolute Monarchy.

In Denmark the land reforms resulted in the Jutish Heath later being put under the plough and made into productive agricultural land, instead of becoming dominated by sheep farming. In the same manner, s Scottish land reform would likely have lead to a similar transformation of the Scottish Moor. For the people who think this is impossible look at the Faroe Islands, which are far more inhospitable than the Scottish islands and still have a far large population density, and that’s something which happened over the 19th and 20th century.
 
Speaking as a Brit from a farming family who has a cousin who farms on the Black Isle near Inverness and who has been on holiday to the Highlands you are never going to see the Highlands put under the plough outside the Great Glen and the area around Inverness and that is arable in OTL. The soil type and bedrock are wrong, the gradients are wrong and the climate is wrong and before you say "places further north have arable farming", yes they do but the Highlands of Scotland have a lot of rain and extremely poor drainage meaning the land is intrinsically better suited as permanent pasture. Now there are small areas in the Highlands that in the past were in arable production and which have okay drainage but as part of a broader agricultural system it is better to have them as dry, in by pasture.

As for the Faroe Islands comparison you are comparing apples with oranges. Scotland as a whole has a much higher population density than the Faroe Islands and that is the accurate comparison. Most Faroese have made their living from fishing not farming for centuries and just as a Faroese could give up scraping a living from the hills and go whale hunting so a Highlander could walk to a better paying job in on the boats in Aberdeen or a factory job in Glasgow. As for long distance migration thanks to the British Empire the Highlanders had many more opportunities to be a Scot outside of Scotland e.g. Ontario, South NZ, the hurdle for emigration (there were no Faroese dominated colonies) was much higher the Faroese meaning proportionally fewer emigrated.
 
Alternative way to preserve it might be to have a successful Jacobite movement in Scotland, leading to an independent Scotland, and the large number of people in the Highlands are better because they need manpower to stop the Hanoverians reclaiming Scotland.

Still, hard to see how a Scotland could avoid some form of clearances, they need bodies in factories to be economically competitive too. But at least it'll cut off colonies from the Scots.
 
No Jacobite movement pulls forward the clearances by 50 years. Up until 1745 Clan Chiefs made money and gained status by selling military power to the Lowlands as they had done for centuries. The sooner you break that the sooner they'll move to replace large numbers of subsistence soldier/raider/farmers with smaller numbers of commercial farmers paying higher per acre rents.
That might be how you preserve Gaelic, if you make the transition earlier when Gaelic is stronger you might have an economically stronger and thus more stable 19th century Highlands with less population churn which preserves Gaelic.

I didn't say no movement, I said no rebellions. The clan system was destroyed as reprisal for the '45. You don't have the rebellion, you don't have the crushing.
 
I didn't say no movement, I said no rebellions. The clan system was destroyed as reprisal for the '45. You don't have the rebellion, you don't have the crushing.

No the clan system was destroyed by the landowners, whether Clan Chiefs of ancient lineage (and much of the Highlands was Hannoverian and was never confiscated) or incomers who cleared out subsistence tenants and replaced them with commercial graziers frequently from the Lowlands (thus the decline of Gaelic).

The only way you maintain the Clan system is by having Highland landowners want to keep large numbers of subsistence farmers on their land, accepting the financial penalty for the military benefit. The Jacobite movement in OTL provided such a motive, Jacobites wanted lots of Clansmen for the next rising, Loyalists needed lots of Clansmen to keep an eye on the Jacobites. Without that dynamic the Clearances come forward. Now I suppose if you kept the Jacobite movement simmering but never boiling you could prolong things a bit, but the pull factors (Glasgow, Ontario) were growing stronger and Highland landowners could only bear the financial burden for so long. Also a Jacobite movement that never acts is going to wither.
 
Speaking as a Brit from a farming family who has a cousin who farms on the Black Isle near Inverness and who has been on holiday to the Highlands you are never going to see the Highlands put under the plough outside the Great Glen and the area around Inverness and that is arable in OTL. The soil type and bedrock are wrong, the gradients are wrong and the climate is wrong and before you say "places further north have arable farming", yes they do but the Highlands of Scotland have a lot of rain and extremely poor drainage meaning the land is intrinsically better suited as permanent pasture. Now there are small areas in the Highlands that in the past were in arable production and which have okay drainage but as part of a broader agricultural system it is better to have them as dry, in by pasture.

As for the Faroe Islands comparison you are comparing apples with oranges. Scotland as a whole has a much higher population density than the Faroe Islands and that is the accurate comparison. Most Faroese have made their living from fishing not farming for centuries and just as a Faroese could give up scraping a living from the hills and go whale hunting so a Highlander could walk to a better paying job in on the boats in Aberdeen or a factory job in Glasgow. As for long distance migration thanks to the British Empire the Highlanders had many more opportunities to be a Scot outside of Scotland e.g. Ontario, South NZ, the hurdle for emigration (there were no Faroese dominated colonies) was much higher the Faroese meaning proportionally fewer emigrated.

The Jutish heath was a massive wasteland for more than 5000 years, it had wandering dunes, dust balls and swamps caused by it having a lot of rain and really poor drainage. The former heath today are woodland in the areas, which was too hostile for agriculture, the swamps was drained, and the former dunes and dust balls are covered by a thin layer topsoil. On Bornholm where the central heath was on top of rocky basement, the former heath are today one large forest.

Of course this hard work wasn’t just people who decided to transform the heath to agricultural land, it was pushed by the state and by the “Højskole” movement. But if it had been left to the big landowners the Jutish heath had stayed a place to graze their cows and sheep just as the Scottish highland. But because the state had created land reforms which gave the tenant the land, they worked these people had a incentive to transform hostile wasteland into farmland. Which is why Denmark was the Scandinavian country, which sent the least people to the Americas, because the lack of Norwegian and Swedish colonies, didn’t stop those countries from sending a massive number of people to the Americas.
 
The Jutish heath was a massive wasteland for more than 5000 years, it had wandering dunes, dust balls and swamps caused by it having a lot of rain and really poor drainage. The former heath today are woodland in the areas, which was too hostile for agriculture, the swamps was drained, and the former dunes and dust balls are covered by a thin layer topsoil. On Bornholm where the central heath was on top of rocky basement, the former heath are today one large forest.

Of course this hard work wasn’t just people who decided to transform the heath to agricultural land, it was pushed by the state and by the “Højskole” movement. But if it had been left to the big landowners the Jutish heath had stayed a place to graze their cows and sheep just as the Scottish highland. But because the state had created land reforms which gave the tenant the land, they worked these people had a incentive to transform hostile wasteland into farmland. Which is why Denmark was the Scandinavian country, which sent the least people to the Americas, because the lack of Norwegian and Swedish colonies, didn’t stop those countries from sending a massive number of people to the Americas.

I won't claim to know much about the Jutish Heath however the landscape you describe, a low lying mix of swamp and sand sounds a lot like Thetford or Sandringham and other bits of East Anglia which geologically makes sense. There you saw private landlords like the Earl of Leicester at Holkam and Viscount Townshend at Raynham do something very similar, taking underused common wastes and enclose, drain and improve them thus creating some of the most agriculturally productive parts of England today and a major root vegetable producer (which benefit from the light, sandy soil). I'd also encourage you to look up the drainage of the East Anglian Fens, another project largely carried out by private landowners. Remember where the Agricultural Revolution started, on the Great Estates of England's nobility. So historically speaking the privately dominated English model seems to have outperformed the Royally dominated Danish model.

As for Scotland once again the Highlands are hilly, the clue's in the name, they are not suitable for arable farming, large scale livestock grazing is the optimal model.
 
I won't claim to know much about the Jutish Heath however the landscape you describe, a low lying mix of swamp and sand sounds a lot like Thetford or Sandringham and other bits of East Anglia which geologically makes sense. There you saw private landlords like the Earl of Leicester at Holkam and Viscount Townshend at Raynham do something very similar, taking underused common wastes and enclose, drain and improve them thus creating some of the most agriculturally productive parts of England today and a major root vegetable producer (which benefit from the light, sandy soil). I'd also encourage you to look up the drainage of the East Anglian Fens, another project largely carried out by private landowners. Remember where the Agricultural Revolution started, on the Great Estates of England's nobility. So historically speaking the privately dominated English model seems to have outperformed the Royally dominated Danish model.

As for Scotland once again the Highlands are hilly, the clue's in the name, they are not suitable for arable farming, large scale livestock grazing is the optimal model.

No East Anglia wasn’t similar to the heath, it was similar to the drainage we saw in Western Schleswig, around Roskilde Fjord (with the Lammefjord as the best example) and on the south Danish islands.

This is the Jutish heath (Romantic painting)

upload_2019-4-30_1-43-25.jpeg
 
No................
In the lowlands at least the transition from seudo tribal clan structures with their communal landownership and warrior/farmer/herder/crofter culture to proto-agricultural revolution methods and increasing resource extraction in the from of mining and quarrying activities was to far gone by that point. the highlands without the Bonnie prince business might have held on in some fashion until the late 1800 but the clearances (though through sponsored colonization or economic pressure) would still have happened as the English subverted the clan chiefs bringing the grouse and the sheep in instead of stubborn crofters who could not pay their rents due to crop failures or poor land/agricultural practices. After all the English had already broken one clan based culture in the Irish by this point and subjected the Welsh petty kingdoms to the same treatment so what would stop the red coats from doing the same to the highlanders? On a serious note recruitment to the Uk army would probably be raised along with the sound of Scottish Gaelic in the streets of various industrial towns and in the lowland farms and mines, alongside a steeper rate of emigration.

As others have said, it wasn't "the English" who broke the clan system, it was the clan chiefs themselves, who preferred to have lots of sheep and lots of money than lots of subsistence farmers who made them practically nothing.
 
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