MacKillop More Fruitful Than the Soil

Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands, 1715-1815
1. Auflage 2001
ISBN: 978-1-78885-392-7
Verlag: John Donald
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

This book analyses the origins, development and impact of British Army recruiting in the Scottish Highlands in the period from 1739 to 1815. It examines the interaction of government, landlords and tenantry. Recruiting is analysed within the context of rapid socio-economic change. The emphasis is on tenant reactions to recruiting, and the study concludes that this was a vital factor in bringing about change in the tenurial structure in the region. Both the decline of the tacksman and the emergence of crofting are linked to the process of regiment raising. Military recruiting involved a clear recognition on the part of the Highland landlords and tenantry that the Empire and the 'fiscal military state' offered alternative sources of revenue. Both groups 'colonised' various levels of the state's military machine. As a result of this close involvement, the government remained a vital influence in the area well after 1745, and a major player in the region's economy. Recruiting was not simply a residue of clanship, rather it was a form of commercial activity, analogous to kelping.

Andrew Mackillop is Senior Lecturer in Scottish History at the University of Glasgow.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mackillop, Andrew

Leseproben

Introduction

The impact of British army recruiting within the Scottish Highlands during the period from approximately 1715 to 1815 has been described by a prominent commentator in the following terms: ‘The issue was perhaps the most explosive single element in the entire history of the Highland clearances’.1

Despite the importance attributed in that instance to such military activity, there has been curiously little in-depth analysis of the motives for and impact of regiment raising in the region. Any attempt to explain why there has been such a dearth of academic study of this particular subject needs to bear in mind the present image and reputation of Highland regiments. They constitute in many respects one of Scotland’s most immediately recognisable but controversial cultural icons. To some they represent a distorted and, indeed, distastefully jingoistic hangover from Scotland’s imperial past. More crucially, they also appear to be of little or no actual relevance to the wider processes which shaped modern Scotland, be it demographic, industrial, or agricultural change. Partly for these reasons the academic community seems to have concluded that the examination of Scotland’s distinctive contribution to Britain’s imperial military is somewhat politically incorrect, and best left to purely military historians and antiquarians. Indeed, whatever the validity of claims voiced by one English historian regarding Ireland’s historiographic blindness to its role within eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British imperialism, it is an accusation that undoubtedly has a ring of truth with respect to Scotland.2 One specific result of this situation has been that these regiments and the processes that created them have been all but buried under a whole corpus of material from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which can generally be described as regimental histories. This literature has overly romanticised such levies; indeed, in the case of some Victorian examples it descends into almost racial stereo-typing of the Gael as an enthusiastic, undisciplined warrior whose natural fighting genius only found full expression once contained within the disciplined framework of the British army. Generally, this genre emphasises the direct Highland connections and traditions of such regiments and ensures that the whole issue is represented largely from the army’s perspective, with little or no reference to the wider social and economic context. Often written by army or ex-army officers, such regimental histories continue to reinforce an interpretation that many would describe as at best historically inaccurate and, at worst, as conveying a false and twee image of the Highlands and Scotland as a whole.3

This book, then, is an attempt to rectify the lack of a broad political, socio-economic study of recruitment in the Highlands. Its aim has been to try and understand its origins and impact and to examine the process through all its stages, from its role within eighteenth-century British imperialism to its consequences for the various tenant groups residing upon Highland estates. The approach has been to examine as wide a variety of sources as possible. Highland history has traditionally been dogged by controversy over the extent to which reliance upon one particular source, be it estate records or Gaelic poetry, somehow invalidates the findings of those who use it.4 The book makes no apologies for deploying government and, above all, estate records in an effort to understand why recruitment occurred to the extent it did. Yet, in order to understand how estate populations reacted to their involvement, whether voluntary or otherwise, in this process, a deliberate research strategy has been to examine tenant petitions and memorials in an attempt to shed some light on what the expectations and agenda of Gaels actually were. Obviously, such a source is far from perfect: petitioning inevitably involved tenantry deferring to proprietary authority and tempering their opinions in order to avoid alienating either the factor or the laird. Nonetheless, such material provides an invaluable insight into the actual, specific demands of individuals, and has the additional benefit of not being influenced by hindsight. Above all, this study is based upon what seems, to its author at least, the common sense premise that particular sources are best used when they appear to be most appropriate. Thus, for example, government and estate records form the bulk of research material for chapters on the origin and tenurial consequences of military recruiting, while Gaelic poetry forms part of the assessment of how if at all military service moulded the Gaels’ sense of their own identity.

Nothing better illustrates the need for a fuller understanding of military recruitment than the importance accorded to it in the historiography of the Highland Clearances. The publication of David Stewart of Garth’s Sketches of the Character, Manners and Present State of the Highlanders of Scotland, and, later, the deeply influential Gloomy Memories by Donald Macleod helped ensure recruitment emerged as a vital component within the wider high-profile debate surrounding land and population in the region. In what was for the Victorians one of the most emotive and cogent arguments against the estate management policies of Highland proprietors, Macleod contended that: ‘The children and nearest relations of those who sustained the honour of the British name in many a bloody field – the heroes of Egypt, Corunna, Tolouse, Salamanca and Waterloo – were ruined, trampled upon, dispersed, and compelled to seek an asylum across the Atlantic’.5

There is little doubt that the recruitment issue intensified dispute over the status and rights of Gaels. It insured the profound sense of betrayal, absent with respect to the rest of Scotland, that characterised discussion of land use and agricultural change in the region. Its impact upon perceptions of the Sutherland Clearances is typical in this respect. The mass evictions in Sutherland in the first two decades of the nineteenth century have for some time been accepted as unusual in terms of the numbers involved and amounts of capital deployed. Yet it is not merely the matter of scale that explains the unusually intense passions aroused by the Sutherland Clearances. The Sutherlands were in fact the last landlord family from the region to raise a proprietary regiment for the British army, and that fact alone goes a long way towards explaining the particularly bitter folk memories associated with them. In Alexander Mackenzie’s immensely popular book. The History of the Highland Clearances, first pubhshed in 1883, particular attention was paid to the irony of military service and British patriotism being rewarded with eviction. Mackenzie’s book gave detailed accounts regarding the lack of Highland men for the Crimean War. He directly contrasted this poor response to the large number of men that late Victorian society firmly believed had been recruited under the clan system during the French and Napoleonic period.6 This military dimension to the wider debate on the Highlands thus proved vital in the development of popular views of the region in the second half of the nineteenth century. Above all, it ensured that, unlike other areas such as Ireland, Highland depopulation came to be seen as a matter of British national interest. The betrayal of a people that many firmly believed to be the nation’s finest soldiers moved the debate onto an entirely different level, away from property and legal rights, and onto moral and even patriotic grounds. Furthermore, it undoubtedly assisted the process whereby landlords were put on the moral and political defensive by the 1880s. It was thus noted of the region’s proprietors:

Alas, for the blush that would cover their faces if they would allow themselves to reflect that, in their names, the fathers, mothers, brothers, wives, of the invincible ‘78th’ had been remorselessly driven from their native soil. But we tell Highland proprietors that were Britain some twenty years hence to have the misfortune to be plunged into such a crisis as the present, there will be few such men as the Highlanders of the 78th to fight her battles [and] if another policy towards the Highlanders is not adopted, that sheep and deer, ptarmigan and grouse, can do but little to save it in such a calamity.7

In essence, the landlords stood accused of acting against the nation’s defence and security interests. It is worth noting at this point that such an analysis was in fact a substantial distortion of Britain’s real military situation in the 1880s. Though the number of Highlanders recruited had been prone to exaggeration during the eighteenth century itself, it was even more the case that by the last decades of the nineteenth century Gaels could in no way be described as a vital element in Britain’s recruiting strategy or a decisive factor in her military strength. Indeed, contrary to popular understanding, Highlanders, and Scots in general, did not make up a particularly strong numerical element within the British army after the 1830s. They were, for example, proportionally outnumbered by the Irish, who undoubtedly constituted the best British recruiting ground relative to population.8 However, the legends surrounding Highland regiments ensured that recruiting retained its position as an important issue determining wider attitudes to the region. Indeed, military service had given additional legitimacy to the land claims of Highland populations since before the beginning of the nineteenth century. That this moral aspect had been noticeably unsuccessful until the 1880s should in no way detract from the fact that it...