WI: No Highland Clearances?

I have heard the Highland Clearances, these days, would be considered ethnic cleansing and that they destroyed earlier Highland culture. What would be the effects of this?
 
Well it would depend on why the Clearances didn't happen. Did Cumberland just completely contradict his atrocious personality to not push for the clearances, or did the Jacobites win? Way different results for each POD
 
Ummm... Remember, folks, that this was not done TO the Highlanders by the evil Sassanach or any other outside forces. No, it was Clan Lairds dispossessing their own clan members for the sake of the almighty dollar (well, pound, same difference). How do you get Lairds to foreswear all that lovely, lovely moolah and behave?

The problem is largely that it really only takes one asshole Laird to try it, and then the temptation for the others is very, very high.

Youd likely have to get somevery prominent preacher, probably Calvinist, to stand up and loudly condemn the practice in a series of fiery sermons. Then have the Catholic church basically say, hey, if the money grubbing Calvinists are behaving themselves, you Catholic Lairds have to show yourselves as good as them.

Of course, getting a Scots Calvinist to successfully preach against wealth, or getting the Catholic establishment to back peasants against the nobility in that time. Let alone both. Let alone having either church agree that the other set a good example. Well, its not very probable, shall we say. Not quite ASB, but heading there fast. Imo.
 
The Highland Clearances attract a lot of attention because a.) they were quite brutal and b.) They happened in Britain, a country which has a lot of historians. But actually they were just another form of rural depopulation, the same thing you can see in Montana or Western Queensland ghost towns.

The Scottish Highlands while very pretty are from an agricultural perspective a near desert. They are very mountainous, have very poor soil and a pretty marginal climate. The fact that they were such a nasty place to live is why a Gaelic speaking tribal culture was able to persist until the mid-1700's, 600 years after it had died out in the more hospitable bits of Scotland along the East Coast and in the Central Belt.

Now the Highland Clearances were only a part of the mass movement of people out of the Highlands either to be farmers in North America and Oceania or to the bright lights of Glasgow and the Industrial Revolution. On the whole it was a voluntary process but it was punctuated by genuine clearances where landowners forced people out but while there is a clear moral difference between the two both are part of the same change. The Highland from 1715 to 1850 moved from one form of society i.e. a tribal system of subsistence agriculture centered around the good or the tribe (clan), to large scale, low stock rate pastoral agribusiness with the aim of producing a income to the landowner.

So in order to butterfly away the Highland Clearances you need to do one of three things. First option is to stop the economic and social developments that made the pre-Clearances Highland culture obsolete. While possible stopping the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution is pretty hard. Second is make everyone in the Highlands embrace change voluntarily preventing the need for landowners to clear land but considering human nature that isn't likely. If even if people would be better off as Glasgow factory workers rather than subsistence herdsmen one bad winter from starvation you are going to get people who oppose change. The third is to have landowners accept that maximising the income potential from their land isn't as important as preserving the ancient Highland culture. That's frankly ASB.
 
Ummm... Remember, folks, that this was not done TO the Highlanders by the evil Sassanach or any other outside forces. No, it was Clan Lairds dispossessing their own clan members for the sake of the almighty dollar (well, pound, same difference). How do you get Lairds to foreswear all that lovely, lovely moolah and behave?

The problem is largely that it really only takes one asshole Laird to try it, and then the temptation for the others is very, very high.

Youd likely have to get somevery prominent preacher, probably Calvinist, to stand up and loudly condemn the practice in a series of fiery sermons. Then have the Catholic church basically say, hey, if the money grubbing Calvinists are behaving themselves, you Catholic Lairds have to show yourselves as good as them.

Of course, getting a Scots Calvinist to successfully preach against wealth, or getting the Catholic establishment to back peasants against the nobility in that time. Let alone both. Let alone having either church agree that the other set a good example. Well, its not very probable, shall we say. Not quite ASB, but heading there fast. Imo.

You need to somehow retain the position where a tail of fighting men is more profitable (in money, loot, prestige, likelihood of not dying ) than the money that can be made from leasing the clan territory for sheep runs.

I think that would need a fairly early PoD. One possibility might be if the British government decided that Scottish soldiers were the answer to a generals prayer (as well as a maiden's prayer :p), and decided to fill the ranks of the British army by commissioning the Highland clan chiefs to raise regiments; and paying them well for the task. That would make raising men more profitable than raising sheep.
 
I think that would need a fairly early PoD. One possibility might be if the British government decided that Scottish soldiers were the answer to a generals prayer (as well as a maiden's prayer :p), and decided to fill the ranks of the British army by commissioning the Highland clan chiefs to raise regiments; and paying them well for the task. That would make raising men more profitable than raising sheep.

They did that in OTL, look at the Gordon Highlanders. The problem is that once they come onto the British armies books they a.) don't need a croft* to support them in peacetime and b.) as professional soldiers can't run a croft in peacetime. No the Highland Clan culture was doomed c.1700 as economic and social developments made it obsolete. It took 100 years for the last vestiges to die and then almost immediately was recreated by Walter Scott et al as a "Romantic" tale of the Noble Savage, something that has lasted until now. Speaking as a member of a Highland Clan** by patrilineal descent the life of a clansman was pretty awful. Scratching a living from the worst land in the British Isles, always on the brink of starvation and with your life punctuated by regular bouts of extreme violence either during everyday cattle raiding or during the less frequent but more deadly clan wars, oh and all that plus a hefty dose of religious fanaticism either with the Catholics or the Calvinists. I'll take my London flat and office job every time, even counting the rushhour Jubilee line.


*Highland hill farm
**admittedly one who came south to England a long time ago.
 
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Instead of Scotish histories blaming the English for the clearancies, you'll have Scotish histories blaming the English for preventing rural development.

:rolleyes:
 
Well one thing I can imagine it affecting is the state of Scots Gaelic in Scotland, with a much larger pool of speakers and making it stronger today.

Would the greater number of potentially rebellious highlanders mean another Jacobite uprising is possible?
 
They ran out of Jacobite claimants after a while. And to be fair, Bonnie Prince Charles was a horrid person who wanted to be King of England, with the Scots merely being cannon fodder for him.
 
Well aren't all monarchs bad people? William of Orange wasn't exactly a saint.

I know the Pope recognized the new dynasty eventually, I think the Jacobite line of succession is with some Bavarian Graf now.

The use of them as soldiers seems most likely. I mean OTL the highland regiments are famous, an expansion of that could only be of benefit for the Empire.
 
He was bad in that he was imcompetent, did not mainly want the area he had a better claim to and support in favor of a richer area that didn't like him, as well as being willing to renounce his religion after a point. As for the Bonnie Prince we should also think of his foreign backers. The French King's opinion of him wasn't high, and he was even willing to have him crowned king of England and France while staying in his country. Anyways, we should look at the major landowners in the Highlands and what they invested their profits from wool and other things in.
 
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