Scottish Sceptic

Were the clearances or the improvements more significant in the creation of the deserted upland landscapes which exist all over Scotland? What are the most important benefits of the study of deserted settlements? By Mike Haseler as part of Glasgow University Archaeology course (Note this is long: on A4 it is 20 pages long)

Preamble

Fig 1: Cadet George Armstrong “Autie” Custer, c1859

The Battle of Little Bighorn or Custer’s Last Stand is an iconic battle between the Europeans and native Americans. It was fought in June 1876 between the Sioux nation “Indians” or “native Americans” and the 7th Cavalry: a veteran organisation created after the American Civil war. General Custer was of immigrant German and English stock. (Wert 1996).

In 1887 Buffalo Bill took his wild west show to Great Britain in celebration of the Jubilee year of Queen Victoria. Performers re-enacted the riding of the Pony Express, Indian attacks on wagon trains, and stagecoach robberies. The show was said to end with a re-enactment of Custer’s Last Stand, in which Cody portrayed General Custer. 21 years later a group of boys went to a camp on Brownsea island under a famous veteran of the Boer War Named “Baden Powell”. He enhanced and honed his military scouting skills amidst the native Zulu in the early 1880s in the Natal province of South Africa. It was this native “Scouting” which so attracted the boys and the group became known as the “Boy Scouts” – a name earlier used in 1899 to describe Harry White, Buffalo Bill’s assistant. A couple of decades after BP led to the foundation in 1926 of the “Hitler Jugend Bund der deutschen Arbeiterjugend”, (Hitler Youth League of German Worker Youth), along similar lines to the Boy Scouts but viewed as providing a future “Aryan supermen” indoctrinated in racist anti-Semitism. As soon as Hitler took power in 1933, the persecution and exodus of Germany’s 525,000 Jews began followed by their mass murder.

In his paper “Agents of Dispossession and Acculturation. Edinburgh Accountants and the Highland Clearances”, Stephen Walker (2003) summed up the the clearances thus:

The mass clearance of people from the Highlands and Islands remains one of the most emotive episodes in the history of Scotland. The attempts by Highland landowners to forcibly evict whole rural communities and encourage their migration in order to make way for large sheep farms and deer forests “is one of the sorest, most painful, themes in modern Scottish history” (Richards, 2000, p. 3). In his comprehensive history of the region, Hunter asserts that the clearances were “the absolute nadir of the entire Highlands and Islands experience” (1999, pp. 13–14). The eviction of crofters and cottars from the late 18th to the late 19th century continues to fuel sentiments of anti-landlordism and revulsion against the principal perpetrators: they “rank with Glencoe and Culloden in the literature of condemnation. It is a subject which regularly raises the chant of ‘genocide’ ” (Richards, 2000, p. 4).

The genocide to which Richards & Walker referred, was persecution and mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis; a genocide without equal, but one that was preceded by many others before and after Custer. Following the defeat of the Nazis there were massive changes. Israel was formed, the old colonial empires were dismantled. Forced “westernisation” of indigenous groups such as the Australian Aborigines ended, apartheid disappeared in S. Africa. Soon the “culture of apology” became widespread: in 2006 the UK issued “statement of regret” over slavery, likewise the US House of representatives in 2008. The UK & Australian governments apologised c2010 for the forced removal of aborigine children. So it is no surprise that almost as soon as the new Scottish parliament opened, it debated the following motion:

That the Parliament expresses its deepest regret for the occurrence of the Highland Clearances and extends its hand in friendship and welcome to the descendants of the cleared people who reside outwith our shores. ( S1M-1004 Scottish Parliament 2000)

And those listening were left with little doubt that members saw the highland clearances as one of racist genocide:

there is no doubt that they happened and that they led to the destruction of the Highlands that Boswell and Johnson saw in their celebrated tour of the Hebrides. At the time of their visit to the north, that process was already in hand, but the clearances were responsible for its completion. … In other countries, the genocide and ethnic cleansing that has taken place, against the Indians in America and the Aborigines in Australia, was acknowledged long ago. Today, the time to acknowledge what happened to those who were cleared from the Highlands has come. (Fergus Ewing (SNP)) Continue reading →