Devine Clearance and Improvement

Land, Power and People in Scotland, 1700-1900
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-1-78885-405-4
Verlag: John Donald
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

Social and economic changes included an increase in production of food and raw materials, in turn sustaining the remarkable growth of towns and cities over this period. However, in the folk memory of Scotland the social and cultural costs of the revolution loom much larger: the loss of land for many thousands of families; the rise of individualism and the decline of neighborhood; the death of old rural societies which had formed Scotland's character for many generations. The drama and tragedy of Highland history during this period have attracted many authors, whereas the Lowland experience, that of the majority of Scots, hardly any. This book attempts to redress that balance, and in so doing examines why this extraordinary era, inextricably associated with failure, famine and clearance in Gaeldom, is remembered as one of 'improvements' in the Lowlands, where the folk memory of dispossession, if it ever existed, is long lost in collective amnesia. In so doing, Devine addresses an issue which goes right to the heart of the nation's past.

Sir Tom Devine is the Sir William Fraser Professor Emeritus of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author or editor of more that forty books on Scottish historical studies and related fields. The only historian to be knighted by HM The Queen 'for services to the study of Scottish history', he has been described by The Times newspaper as 'as close to a national bard as the nation has'.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Devine, Tom M.

Leseproben

TWO

Irish and Scottish Development Revisited

I

Irish and Scottish historians came together for the first time at a seminar in September 1976 at Trinity College, Dublin to explore aspects of the comparative development of both societies. The idea for this pioneering event had come from Louis Cullen and Christopher Smout, who saw the scholarly potential of examining in depth the experience of two countries in the same geographical area which had strong historical similarities but which, especially in the nineteenth century, had developed in radically different ways.1

The approach proved to be very fruitful, not simply for the study of Ireland and Scotland but, more generally, for the evolution of comparative historical studies within the British Isles. Since 1976 a further four conferences have been held with publication of the proceedings normally following soon afterwards.2 In addition, the whole field of Irish and Scottish studies has flourished with scholarly interest extending from history to language, literature and culture. Important institutional developments have taken place.3 In the 1990s, the Irish-Scottish Academic Initiative was founded by a consortium consisting of Aberdeen and Strathclyde Universities and Trinity College, Dublin. Later this trio was joined by Queen’s University, Belfast. Research institutes devoted to the comparative study of Ireland and Scotland were established at Aberdeen and Trinity. In 2000 the then UK Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) generously funded an AHRB Centre in the field based at Aberdeen but with close academic links to scholars in Trinity and Queen’s. Irish and Scottish studies are now an integral part of the development of non-anglocentric British studies which have strongly emerged in this era of devolution and constitutional change.

A key element in the success story was the systematic pursuit of historical comparisons and contrasts suggested by Cullen and Smout in the 1970s. At the heart of their research agenda was the central question of the profound economic and social divergence of Ireland and Scotland in the nineteenth century.4 In this respect, the experience of the two nations could not have been more different. By the 1850s Scotland had been transformed by unusually rapid industrialisation and urbanisation. Already an economic superpower, the country was on the threshold of even greater global pre-eminence as world-wide demand boomed for Scottish iron, steel, ships, railway stock and jute in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ireland’s economic performance was one of dramatic contrast. The country suffered the worst human catastrophe in Europe with the Great Famine of the 1840s. Some scholars saw this not simply as a natural disaster, a ‘visitation from God’, but as a terrible consequence of profound structural weaknesses in both the Irish economy and social system.5 Over the long run the main symptom of these chronic difficulties became mass emigration. Over eight million men, women and children left Ireland between 1801 and 1921: ‘growing up in Ireland meant preparing to leave it’.6

There was also an intriguing puzzle behind these patterns of divergent development. In reviewing the conference discussions of 1976, Cullen and Smout asserted that these remarkably different outcomes were not inevitable.7 At the beginning of the eighteenth century Ireland and Scotland had much in common. Both were underdeveloped rural economies with large areas of semi-subsistence activity, a small urban sector and exports based on a range of foods, raw materials and cheap textiles. In the context of western Europe as a whole, both were relatively poor by comparison with some other countries. This was illustrated by the high levels of outmigration of both Irish and Scots for military service and trading opportunities on the Continent throughout much of the seventeenth century.8 Indeed, the consensus in 1976 seemed to be that though neither country was prospering, ‘Ireland seemed to hold more promise of a bright economic future than Scotland at the opening of the eighteenth century’.9

This conclusion partly emerged from a consideration of the scattered pieces of evidence on exports and population size which purported to show that, though the size of the two trading sectors was small by comparison with such ‘advanced’ economies as Holland and England, estimated values of exports per head were demonstrably higher in Ireland than Scotland.10 Other clues suggested a similar interpretation. At the second Irish-Scottish conference in 1981, Rosalind Mitchison had ‘no doubt’ that the market economy was bigger in late seventeenth-century Ireland than Scotland and that the Scottish economy was ‘the more primitive of the two’, not least because the Irish had a more extensive, varied and flexible range of exports.11 The 1690s were a decade of misery for the Scots, with the notorious ‘Lean Years’ of consecutive harvest failures, the Darien disaster and the impact of continental war and state mercantilism on national trade. For Ireland, the same decade has been depicted as one of economic recovery, ‘particularly powerful towards the end with strong external demand for Irish grain and animal products’.12 Migration trends reinforced the conclusion that Ireland was at this time the more dynamic economy. The movement of Scots to Ulster had been taking place from the early years of the seventeenth century but in the 1690s this migration became a flood as a result of crop failure and economic crisis in Scotland.13

As will be seen in more detail below, this concept of a more ‘advanced’ Ireland c. 1700 has been challenged by recent interpretations. However, even these revisions to earlier thinking have not resolved, the puzzle of dramatic divergence in later times. It is clear, for instance, that for much of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the classic period of ‘take off’ of Scottish industrialisation, both economies were doing rather well.14 Superficially, at least, there were still no unambiguous signs of the deep contrasts in performance which were to become all too visible only a generation later. The primary motors of Scottish economic growth, colonial commerce, the linen manufacture and an increase in agricultural output, were all replicated to a greater or lesser extent in Ireland.15 Scottish success in the tobacco trade was paralleled by Irish achievements in the Atlantic provisioning trades. Linen, Scotland’s ‘staple industry’ and the backbone of later expansion into other forms of textile production, including cotton, was growing fast but not quite as rapidly as the Irish manufacture. Nor was the Scottish linen sector as large or as successful in penetrating export markets as that in Ireland.16 Furthermore, both rural economies, albeit by developing different strategies, proved capable of substantially increasing the supply of grain and animal products.

It was in this period that Ireland emerged as the ‘bread basket’ of England while, without an ‘agricultural revolution’, the remarkably fast rate of urbanisation in Scotland could not have been sustained.17 Indeed, Irish grain exports by the 1790s had become a vital part of the food supply system to the burgeoning towns and cities of the industrialising west of Scotland. One estimate suggests that imports of oats and oatmeal from Ireland in that decade may have been feeding around 40,000 people per annum, or 2.5 per cent of the Scottish population.18 Against this background, it was hardly surprising that Ireland at the time was seen as a serious competitive threat to Scottish economic interests. Contemporary commentators such as John Knox took the view that Ireland was at least as developed as Scotland. The Glasgow business community was also plainly anxious about this commercial rival on its doorstep. A storm of protest from the West of Scotland greeted the government proposal of 1778 to permit direct trade between Ireland and the colonies in most goods.19 There was it seems no sign of the massive problems which afflicted Ireland little more than a generation later.20

II

The enquiry launched by Cullen and Smout into the divergent development of Ireland and Scotland has been deepened and refined in recent years not only by further symposia on Irish and Scottish comparisons but also by more general historiographical advances in both countries. This essay attempts to draw some of the threads of this research into a more coherent pattern by considering those factors which, on current knowledge, seem to be central to the explanation of differential development.

One assumption of 1976 has been seriously questioned. It is now much less certain that Ireland was ahead of Scotland in the early eighteenth century, or even that there was a broad equality of underdevelopment between the two countries. Other evidence now suggests that, on the contrary, Scotland may already have had the advantage before 1760, though not yet decisively. Three points are relevant. First, as Louis Cullen himself argued at the second Irish-Scottish conference in 1981, ‘foreign trade is a dangerous basis for assumptions about comparative development’.21 Thus, the fact that in the later 1690s Irish exports have been estimated at around 65. per head compared to Scotland’s at 45. per head may simply reflect higher levels of commercialisation in Ireland rather than greater wealth.22 Increasingly, more of the products from Irish farms were diverted to the export trade and less consumed by the rural poor. This is the background to the dietary revolution of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth...