Bonnie Price Charlie stays in France

Moglwi

Monthly Donor
I was wondering what the board thought about what would be development of the UK if Prince Charles Stuart had not arrived in Scotland in 1744? No Clearances? No destruction of the clans
 
Probably still Clearances. The social processes that led to them are there already: the British government had been encouraging chiefs to set themselves up as ordinary landlords before the rising (other polices were also pre-Jacobite: there were already Highland troops in Europe when the '45 broke out, and after the '15 the government had used the revenues from confiscated estates to set up Scots-speaking schools to try and weed out Gaelic culture) and once you were a landlord without obligations to your tennants, it became very tempting to replace them with profitable cheviots.

The Clearances were basically carried out by accountants on behalf of an increasingly Anglified and absenteeist (and skint) landowning class who were nevertheless the direct descendants of chiefs; and although it came at a differant time (because of the differant rural societies) it was part of much wider Scottish and British phenomena of the earliest industrial period whereby people left the land for the cities. It's seldom remembered that there were Lowland Clearances.

But without the decades-long ban on various trappings of Highland culture, it's likely to continue much as it was until those social phenomena come into play (which may be a bit later than OTL). Interestingly, this means that kilts and all the rest of it aren't just lying around when Sir Walt comes along with a mandate to save George IV's public relations and give went to his own romantic imagination. Biscuit-barrel Scotland may never exist. I as an Edinbugger may never have worn anything except trousers.
 
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