J.P.D. Dunbabin - Rural Discontent in Nineteenth Century Britain

The nineteenth century was a time of great turmoil for rural communities in the British Isles. In Scotland the post enclosure era was being shaped by vicious struggles over land and Crofters' rights, in Wales battles of tithes and semi-rural protests such as the Rebecca Riots were causing a crisis for the rural authorities and in England the agricultural working class was making itself known - firstly in the wave of struggles around Captain Swing and then with the explosion of trade unionism in the 1870s and the strikes associated with that.

J.P.D. Dunbabin's Rural Discontent in Nineteenth Century Britain has long been a standard text for those trying to get their heads around the period and understand the dynamics of the struggles and their links to economic policies. I picked it up recently to read in preparation for a talk about Joseph Arch and I was impressed by several of the essays. The book is at its best in covering the struggles around trade unionism. While the book is authored by Dunbabin, two of the chapters are written by other authors, both giants in the field of rural history - Pamela Horn and A.J.Peacock. Peacock's essay on Vilage Radicalism in East Anglia is obviously focused, but there is a wealth of analysis of the Swing and other incenidary attacks localy. Pamela Horn's article on Oxfordshire and the agricultural trade union movement is superb. Her use of minute books from union branches and the details of the often angry fights between unions themselves, do not obscure a brilliant tale of deep rooted and brave trade union activism. She convincingly argues that the "Oxfordshire farm worker... was better off financially than he had been in the 1860s" as a result of trade unionism. It's an important, if contested argument, so Horn's conclusion:

it may be argued that the rise in wages which occurred in the 1870s would have come anyway as agriculture was prosperous and the demand for labour buoyant at a time when employment in urban industry was at a high level. But it must be remembered that such prosperity had existed before without the labourers deriving any great benefit from it. Union agitation pinpointed the need for some redistribution of agricultural income in favour of the farm worker.

It should also be noted that Horn's article includes a map of trade union branches in Oxfordshire which is remarkable in showing the scale of the movement.

The rest of the book belongs to Dunbabin and there is a real breadth here. Some of these are wider in their coverage, a general introduction to the nineteenth century and a chapter on tenant rights in general. Some of the other chapters are more niche - those on the tithe wars in Wales and the Crofters War in Scotland may appeal more to students of the topics rather than the general reader, though Dunbabin has a nack for putting interesting and illuminating anecdotes within the general analysis.

Dunbabin's conclusion though is interesting. Noting the disturbances in Wales and Scotland and the fact that local authorities there were unable to deal with the discontent, he makes the interesting point:

In ninetenth century Britain unrest sometimes passed beyond the control of the local establishments but never beyond that of central Government. So where concessions were made from weakness (as was the forced return of 10 per cent to Welsh tithe-payers), they wer emost likely to be the work of local men. Similarly the central Government did not frame its policies with a view to the avoidance of rural unrest. But such avoidance was one of the factors behing the southern English tendnency in the half-century after Waterloo, to spread work rather than to maximise productivity.

The authorities tended to react to events - dropping threshing machines after Captain Swing, or introducing farmers associations in response to strikes - rather than trying to prevent discontent - to their detriment. Dunbabin's general conclusions are also interesting. He notes the long drawn out struggle to get Parliament to agree a Land Act that would offer some form of justice. This was finally given a nail in the coffin by World War One, with Lloyd George failing to push it though. What might have happened had it "got under way" would "have provided an interesting bridge between the ideas and aspirations... [in the book] and the conditions of the new century."

That did not happen, but Dunbabin's book is a very useful, if a little dry in places, introduction to the swirl of struggle and ideology around rural communities and agriculture in this most fascinating of transitionary centuries.

Related Reviews

Horn - Labouring Life in the Victorian Countryside
Horn - Life and Labour in Rural England 1760-1850
Thompson - The Making of the English Working Class
Hobsbawm & Rudé - Captain Swing

James Hunter - Glencoe and the Indians

This is a remarkable little book of history and autobiography, that uses the incredible story of the Scottish people who left Scotland and ended up in North America, to tell parallel stories about how the further development of capitalism in the 18th and 19th century transformed the lives of ordinary people. The book centres on the McDonald family, many of whom today live in the Flathead Reservation in West Montana. They ancestors arrived in North America, making a home and living for themselves in the territories being opened up by the defeat and expulsion of the indigenous people. They themselves had left Scotland because of a similar process, that saw the defeat and decline of the Highland clans as a result of wider, social and economic changes in Scotland. These parallels are obvious, if only for their inherent violence, but they are not exact. As James Hunter explains:

By 1815... both Glencoe and the rest of the Highlands had witnessed the complete disintegration of the clans which had for so long been central to the lives of Scotland's Gaelic-speaking communities. This disintegration was as inevitable - and had much the same causes - as the collapse, a hundred or so years later, of tribes like the Nez Perce. The civilisation which was coming into existence in eighteenth-century Britain... was utterly intolerant of older forms of social organisation. This civilisation... looked to the land primarily as a source of the commodities... which its burgeoning cities required in ever larger quantities... land had everywhere to be reorganised; that it was no longer sufficient for the Scottish Highlands to be given over to subsistence agriculture of the sort which had been practised by the clans; that it was not longer sufficient either for the American West.

In other words, the development of industrial capitalism transformed relations on the land, from ownership to usage, in order to further develop capitalism. The people who lived on that land were dispossessed, killed or forced into emigration. 

Hunter tells the story of what happened to the Highlanders and Native Americans in painful detail. He also shows how some, like Angus McDonald, the key immigrant to Montana from the Highlands in this book, formed close and loving relations with Native Americans. Angus rose through a life working for the Hudson Bay Company, ironically, a company whose massive profits came from the systematic use and abuse of natural resources that Native Americans relied on. The fur trade that the Company developed becoming part of forcing transformation on to the indigenous communities, tying them into a global trading network which saw natural resources (like beaver fur) purely as commodities. 

But Hunter shows that there was a fundamental difference between former Highland clan leaders and Native American chiefs. The former were white and could become integrated into a capitalist system that was based on white supremacy. The Native Americans could not. While Angus McDonald could form strong personal bonds, this was not the reality of the United States as a whole, where racism and white supremacy formed (and continues to form) an key part of its state ideology.

The links between native America and settler America... were always very tenuous. And though Highlanders were, from time to time, subjected to discrimination and persecution of a quasi-racial type, Highlanders were white. Highland chiefs, by virtue of that fact alone, had many more options open to them than were available to men like Sitting Bull, Looking Glass or White Bird. Because there was no insurmountable racial obstacle in their being assimilated into the upper echelons of British society, and because it suited the British government to hasten the destruction of clanship by thus subverting clanship's ruling elite, clan chiefs... found it surprisingly easy to take on what amounted to entirely new identities. 

Hunter makes a further important point about race in this context. He emphasises that not all former Highlanders treated Native Americans positively. In fact most didn't. "More typical" he writes, where those who in the Red River area in 1813, "made good the loss of heir lands back in Scotland by appropriating other lands which had previously been occupied by the Metis.... Right across the North American continent... Highland refugees from eviction, clearance and other forms of oppression were to better themselves at the expense of the Indian peoples."

The point that Hunter returns to, is that the Highland people would have identified themselves as white, and the Indian people as inferior. When Patrick Sellar, who enforced the Sutherland Clearances and has gone down in history as an evil representative of the class who did this to the Highlanders, called those he dispossessed "aborigines", he did so to be deliberately insulting to his victims. Tragically "Most of North America's Highland settlers... were no less racist in their attitude to Indians that settlers from other places". 

The tragedy, as Hunter draws out, is that many of the victims of the Clearances shared an understanding of the land and its use with the Native American people. Land as the "embodiment" of community. But this was not to stop them being drawn in to a violent confrontation which eventually saw the decimation and destruction of a way of life. This is shown, all the more tragically, through the book precisely because much of the McDonald clan and its descendants did become closely linked into the Native American communities and continue to play a central, and celebrated, role in those communities today.

James Hunter's work has long had an important role in highlighting how the destruction of the Highland communities had a global impact. This short book, by focusing on the story of one family, emphasises this and somehow makes it much more personal. He places the Highland Clearances and the dispossession inflicted on the Native American people as part and parcel of a tragic story that saw ecological destruction, genocide and dispossession as an essential part of the rise of capitalism. Today, the struggle to redress these historical consequences continues in both Scotland and North America.

Related Reviews

Hunter - Set Adrift Upon the World: The Sutherland Clearances
Hunter - Insurrection: Scotland's Famine Winter
Devine - The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed
Hutchinson - Martyrs: Glendale and the Revolution in Skye

Malcolm Brown & Patricia Meehan - Scapa Flow

Scapa Flow is at the heart of Orkney, an enormous natural harbour today curiously devoid of ships. Yet in both World Wars it was the base of Britain's main naval fleet - the location from where many ships set out to fight the German Navy at Jutland in 1916 and the home base for ships that fought the Bismark and escorted the Russia convoys. Most importantly it was home to tens of thousands of servicemen and women in both World Wars, troops from the navy, airforce and army who looked after the guns, fuelled the aircraft and above all crewed and maintained hundreds of ships.

Malcolm Brown & Patricia Meehan's brilliant oral history of Scapa Flow tells their story. It arose out of a strange set of circumstances - the BBC made a programme about Scapa Flow, introduced by Ludovic Kennedy who served there. The authors placed an ad in the Radio Times asking for reminiscences and were inundated with replies. Realising they had too much material for one programme, they used much of the remainder in writing this book.

So the history here is told mostly in the voices of the women and men who served in this lonely part of Orkney. Some of the stories are horrible - the accounts of the tragedies of HMS Vanguard in World War One and HMS Royal Oak in the second - are awful. Hundreds of lives lost in a moment. One gets a real sense of how these tragedies shocked those who witnessed them or those who cleared up afterward. One sailor remembered how a diver had seen the bodies of dead men still in their bunks after the sinking of the Royal Oak. Other tragedies such as the sinking of HMS Hampshire and the death of hundreds of sailors, plus the unlamented Lord Kitchener (architect of much slaughter) are also closely associated with Scapa Flow.

The Flow today is filled with wrecks and a favourite location for divers. Many of these are German ships, whose crews took them there for surrender after World War One. The scuttling of the ships was a memorable and shocking event, but I was struck by the accounts here that tell of how badly the German sailors were treated by the British authorities - lacking food, entertainment or much else. It was interesting to hear of a passing reference to a Sailors' Council in the German fleet at Orkney - not least because the crews had been part of the mutiny that began the German Revolution in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. Sadly this did not spread to the British!

But actually one thing you get from these accounts is how dull and monotonous life in Scapa was. Not a few correspondents bemoan that they are not on active service, but standing guard in appalling weather waiting for action, that by and large never came. It is interesting that in both wars caution on the part of the British Naval command essentially left many warships and their crews languishing in Scapa Flow. Boredom, games, drink and loneliness characterise many accounts. Some of these are tragic, like the men who killed themselves from depression. Others are sad, such as the two guardsmen left for weeks alone who desperately tried to stretch out the weekly visits by the men who brought them supplies.

There is no doubt, with hindsight, that those in Orkney during both wars had a relatively good deal - they would probably survive. But the boredom brought with it its own difficulties and while the correspondents often remember the islands and their people fondly, they mostly remember how dull it was. Readers looking for exciting accounts of battle will not find it here. What readers will find is an insight into the war away from the frontlines, boredom and loneliness, with occasional moments of terror and tragedy. As such this excellent oral history is probably of much greater interest that you might expect.

Related Reviews

Terkel - 'The Good War': An Oral History of World War Two
Lund and Ludlam – Trawlers Go to War
Lund & Ludlam - PQ17: Convoy to Hell
Wickham-Jones - Orkney: A Historical Guide

David Kerr Cameron - Willie Gavin, Crofter Man: Portrait of a Vanished Lifestyle

Willie Gavin, Crofter Man, is the second of David Kerr Cameron's trilogy about history and social life in the Scottish countryside. In this volume he looks at Croft farming, through the life of Willie Gavin, a anonymised croft owner from the early 20th century. Willie's life is recreated by Cameron through archival information, tombstones and the reminiscences of children and grandchildren.

Willie was an expert stonemason who became a crofter on his father's croft. Crofting was extremely hard and unrewarding, Cameron is at pains not to romanticise the lifestyle, or portray the life as some sort of rural idyll. Indeed he criticises those who see such farming as romantic in words that might be applied to those who retreat to the countryside imaging an easy rural life:

Of that rage for improvement, the birth of crofting was maybe the greatest betrayal of all; it deluded men, then trampled on their dreams. Folk took on crofts for the independence they thought they gave and doomed themselves to long disappointment. They believed they were perhaps putting a tentative first foot on the farming ladder and found instead that their position was untenably ambiguous in that new countryside and in a restructured society; they were neither masters nor hired men. Sometimes the croft's appeal lay in the deep-seated desire for a house that would be a home, settled and secure, in that new farming landscape of the tied house and the wandering cottar; the occupants found soon enough that the laird was sometimes as hard to please, and always to pay.

Gavin, perhaps, had less illusions, having seen his father's hard work. Though clearly Willie also believed things would be better. Each year the dreamed that the harvest would be his best, enough to break out of the cycle of poverty and debt. Each year it wasn't. In fact his wife was only able to break from the croft with her husband's death and the selling of his last harvest and all their possessions.

Mention of Willie's marriage brings up his wife, Jess MacKendrick. Her life is told by Cameron, alongside that of Willie. It is poignant - for Jess's life was hard - on her fell the twin burden of child rearing and home management, alongside agricultural work. She married Gavin after they met while she was working as a housemaid, and Cameron has dug out the shopping bill she had as, before their marriage, she purchased what would be needed for their home together. It's a moving list of the minutiae of daily life and the prices the merchant charged.

The twentieth century saw crofting life change - machinery for instance. Though Gavin was old fashioned and refused to use such equipment, relying on his own labour until the stroke that nearly killed him at 75 taking in the harvest in his fields. Cameron notes that this was likely Gavin's most successful harvest as he'd finally switched to a modern seed, though too late to make a real difference. 

As with Cameron's other books, he blends archival and oral history with music, poetry and song. He notes how the stories that Jess tells her children provided a continuity, and their telling "knit the generations" and passed down the "Lore of the Gavins and the MacKendricks... imprinting identity". There is a real sense of the crofting life being locked to the past, but challenged by the new. That said, the family were realtively mobile, visiting town, travelling to see relatives and so on. It would be wrong to see them as being so poor they were trapped at the croft, on the other hand the croft demanded attention constantly. 

The problems of this come out on the Sunday. As observant folk, the Gavins would not work on the Sabbath, despite the havoc this played at key moments in the agricultural calendar. Willie might, if Jess was not watching, make an adjustment to a rope - but little else.

As with all of Cameron's work, Willie Gavin, is an accomplished work of social history that will fill in gaps for those visiting Scotland, and perhaps staying in an old croft. There is no sanitisation here - we are constantly reminded that the modern Scottish landscape was made through hard work, poverty and endless labour by people like Willie Gavin and Jess MacKendrick. It is worth reading this book to remind ourselves of this.

Related Reviews

Cameron - The Ballad and the Plough: A Portrait of the Life of the Old Scottish Farmtouns

Caroline Wickham-Jones - Orkney: A Historical Guide

This updated classic historical guide to Orkney is the perfect book to read if you are lucky enough to visit the islands. Caroline Wickham-Jones was a renowned expert historian and archaeologist who lived in Orkney, and there's a real sense of personal touch to the historical summaries and guides: "Bring a torch" she encourages the reader on occasions. 

The book is divided by time period, a short historical overview in chapters dedicated to Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age Orkney followed by the Picts, Norse and Earl eras and then 18th, 19th and contemporary history. The book covers a lot because there's a lot to see in Orkney, a place where recent history is often closely linked to ancient eras. It also means that there is a constantly stream of new things to examine in the islands, so the book benefits from a new chapter on "recent archaeological discoveries", which includes, among other things, Norse burial sites in Papa Westray and the hugely important Ness of Brodgar.

On occasion I found the book a little too compartmentalised. The fantastic Neolithic tomb of Maeshowe is described in detail, and Wickham-Jones mentions the Viking graffiti in it, but doesn't offer translations or information until the section on Norse history. A casual reader using the book as a guide book might easily miss these links. I was also surprised to see little or no discussion of enclosure, displacement or clearances relating to the sites mentioned or the history of Orkney. Given the role this played in the transformation of Orkney's farming landscape I was surprised by this.

Nonetheless this is an extremely useful book that every visitor to the islands ought to read as an introduction to the history and landscape of Orkney.

Related Reviews

Irving - The Fatal Lure of Politics: The life and thought of Vere Gordon Childe
Devine - The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed
Richards - The Highland Clearances
Pryor - Britain BC

James Hunter - Insurrection: Scotland's Famine Winter

In 1846 Scotland's potato crop failed. It was destroyed by the same blight that had wiped out the crop in Ireland. In Ireland millions starved, while boatloads of food were sent abroad for export. In Scotland the potential disaster was just as great. Thousands of families relied completely on the potatoes they could grow for food. Just as in Ireland an excellent cereal crop could have fed ordinary people yet almost all of it was destined to be shipped elsewhere for massive profits.

The story of the Highland Potato Famine has not been told as frequently as events in Ireland. This is a shame because events in Scotland involve heroic resistance by ordinary women and men, that forced food exports to be halted and government action to relieve the suffering of the population. 

Insurrection tells the story of this resistance. While the book was only published in 2019, it's roots lie in James Hunter's early discovery of archive material relating to the famine and the rebellions. It has taken him nearly fifty years to turn these records into a book. But the wait has surely benefited from his long career exploring Scottish history. The story focuses on events in a narrow period of time and place, but are rooted in broader history - a tale of clearances, emigration and class struggle.

It is incorrect to say that potato blight caused the Irish or Scottish potato famines. The blight destroyed that crop - but it was the economic and social relations which meant that hungry labourers could not feed their families. As Hunter explains:

Most of them [Easter Ross crofters] were folk removed from good land to be resettled on worse - often in places where they had no alternative but to carve fields out of bogs or moors that had never been cultivated. A Morning Chronicle journalist, visiting... in the autumn of 1846, spoke with several such crofters whose potatoes, like everyone else's had been wiped out by blight, but whose cereal harvest, that year, had been better than usual. 'It was no relief to tell them that they had a larger crop of oats than formerly,' this journalist reported, 'the answer in every case being, we need all the oats for the factor.' As in Ireland, then, Ross-shire's small-scale agriculturalists could only meet their landlord's rent demands by selling all their grain. Hence the Morning Chronicle man's discovery that 'the constant anxiety of these people is to grow as much oats or barley as will pay the landlord' - they themselves, together with their families, subsisting on the output of potato plots that, in 1846, were largely bereft of potatoes.

As the famine grew, and food and money ran out, in many places mass protests took place to stop the export of cereals. What is remarkable is the scale and organisation of these protests. In some cases thousands of men and women blocked roads to prevent carts taking cereal to harbours. Ships were blockaded by fishing vessels, harbour pilots refused en masse to guide ships and women and men protested for hours until food was withdrawn from export. In many cases the exporters agreed to sell the food to local people for appropriate prices. This last point is worth highlighting as it has many links with the "Moral Economy" described by EP Thompson in 18th and 19th century food riots. Protesters did not, it is repeatedly emphasised by authorities at the time, resort to stealing food. Instead they insisted it was sold at an appropriate, and affordable price. The famine had caused huge inflation, and the poor and hungry couldn't afford the food so they organised for the food to be sold at the correct rate. The only people who lost out where the capitalists. Hunter gives numerous examples, for instance:

It would be a day or two... before military assistance could reach Moray from Fort George. In the interim, [Sheriff Innes] also knew it would be necessary for him to organise the withdrawal of his battered and demoralised special constables from Burghead. The means of doing this were provided by the arrival on the scene of a man described as a 'senior fisherman in Hopeman'. This was John MacPherson.... MacPherson had walked into town to discover he said, 'stones flying in all directions and the windows of the inn smashed into pieces'... MacPherson managed to gain access to the sherrif and, in effect, open negotiations with him. These talks centred on two demands voiced from among the crowd outside. The first was that Innes guarantee that meal would be put on sale in Burghead at a price no higher than 24 shillings a boll. 

The second demand was for the freeing of prisoners. The sheer scale of these protests must be emphasised. At one point Wick, and its harbour town of Pulteneytown, were "controlled entirely by 'the mob'." Pulteneytown was a huge working class fishing town, where living conditions, Hunter says, were on a par with those of Manchester as described by Friedrich Engels. 

The troops sent into Pultenyetown who used fixed bayonets to clear the harbour so food could be loaded onto ships, faced a mass protest. Hunter quotes eye-witnesses:

'The mob... were... very much excited.' Stones began to be hurled and women in particular started to arm themselves by entering nearby cooperages and picking up wooden 'staves' of the sort used to make barrels. 'They were brandishing [those staves], using very bad language and otherwise provoking the troops,'... 'The mob,' Sheriff Thomson said, 'were highly excited, noisy, tumultuous and threatening.' That was why he had no alternative but to read the Riot Act and 'implore the people, for God's sake, to go home'. This,' the sheriff added, 'they refused to do.' It thus became 'indispensable to clear the streets'.

As a result the troops fired upon the protesters and though no one was killed a bystander was badly injured. These events caused a political crisis for the British establishment and national anger at the soldiers for firing on starving people.

The mass protests, riots, blockades and brave confrontations with the forces of "law and order" were a great success. Hunter argues that these events between January and March 1847 led to "a marked and very welcome improvement in the food supplies available to their communities... prices also fell, often substantially, as farmers and landlords, as well as dealers, were persuaded to give greater priority to closer-at-hand purchasers." It is clear, Hunter shows, that this would not have happened without mass protest.

Longer term, Hunter sees the birth of political organisation that helped the crofters fight for further rights. He argues, contra Eric Richards, that the protest movements in Scotland in 1846 and 1847 demonstrated radical organisation: 

The placing of booms across the harbour entrance at Macduff; Buckie and Portgordon people's use of signal flags to communicate with the various coastal settlements between Garmouth and Portknockie; the maintenance for a week or two, of checkpoints on roads leading into Inverness; the blockades kept in place, for a month or more at Cromarty Firth harbours and loading paces like Foulis Point and Invergordon; the handing out of leaflets and the nailing up of placards or posters in Pultenenytown and Wick; these surely show... that organising ability was by no means lacking among men and women drawn from... 'the working classes'.

These movements fed into wider political organisation, and Hunter traces the involvement of Chartists and the eventual creation of the Highland Land Law Reform Association. This, he argues, places the Highland Potato Famine and the mass resistance it provoked, into a wider, radical history of Scotland.

When we read of the Potato Famines we are usually told that they are a story of passive acceptance of fate. Yet Hunter's book demonstrates that this was not always the case, and in parts of the Highlands at least there was a mass movement organised by women and men (and frequently led by the women) in the crofting and fishing communities that refused to allow the people to stave. Insurrection is an inspiring story of forgotten history, I hope that James Hunter's book is widely read and as a result these events become better known throughout the Highlands. 

Related Reviews

Hunter - Set Adrift Upon the World: The Sutherland Clearances
Devine - The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed
Berresford Ellis & Mac A'Ghobhainn - The Radical Rising of 1820
Sutton - Food Worth Fighting For: From Food Riots to Food Banks
Fotheringham, Sherry & Bryce - Breaking Up the British State: Scotland, Independence & Socialism
Hutchinson - Martyrs: Glendale and the Revolution in Skye

Fotheringham, Sherry & Bryce - Breaking Up the British State: Scotland, Independence & Socialism

This is an important and timely book. Published in the aftermath of a historic success for the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the May 2021 election it seeks to discuss the question of Scottish Independence in a Marxist framework and historical context. All the authors and editors are members of the Socialist Workers Party in Scotland, and it is one of the clearest arguments for a socialist strategy around Independence published so far. 

Breaking Up the British State argues that socialists must both support and actively campaign for Independence - but they must do this with clear strategic goals. The key ambition is to further the struggle for socialism through breaking up the British state and weakening capital's ability to defend itself. Thus the book critically examines the ideas of several Independence campaigners on the left, it also pushes a clear independent argument, rooted in opposition to racism, support for democracy, internationalism (particularly in terms of opposition to war and the basing of nuclear weapons at Faslane) and workers' emancipation. As Donny Gluckstein and Bob Fotheringham say in their chapter on Scotland, the National Question and Marxism, when compared to the idea of an independent capitalist Scotland,

the other side of the reformist equation suggests the movement for Scottish independence can mean more than that. Firstly, independence is an articulation of working class aspirations at a time when Labour, under Starmer, has more or less abandoned the effort... Secondly the capitalist state structure which is to be rearranged s the British state. This has an imperial history and worldwide reach and its break up would be significant.

The repeated success of the SNP is often crudely associated with left positions on many questions. There is a detailed critique of this by Iain Ferguson and Gerry Mooney who argue that in reality the SNP's reputation for left positions is superficial at best. Titled Neoliberalism with a Heart, it's a devastating critique of the role of the SNP in office - in terms of housing, education, anti-racism and environmental policies. Despite appearing better than Boris Johnson during Covid, in reality the situation in Scotland is little better - not least because of previous failings of health care policy by the Scottish government.

But understanding the current position of the SNP requires understanding three other aspects of politics in the whole UK. The first is the historic development of Scotland, second the role of the Labour Party and finally the rise and fall of workers' struggle in Scotland. The last two aspects of these are discussed in three excellent chapters. Dave Sherry's account of Red Clydeside is a brilliant summary of the struggles in the first two decades of the twentieth century on the Clyde. This includes the incredible workers' strikes during the First World War and the role of the Clyde Workers' Committee, as well as fascinating struggles over rents and housing. This culminated in the 1919 revolt when Britain was "on the brink of revolution" within which Scottish workers' played a central role. 

Charlie McKinnon's chapter on the Making of the Scottish Working Class looks at earlier periods of struggle, arguing that while these are often portrayed as nationalistic struggles this isn't strictly true. He concludes: 

working class agitation and struggle in Scotland during this period should not be seen in isolation from that of the working class in the rest of Britain. Workers north and south of the border were often engaged in common struggles, such as during the great Chartist Revolt.

That is not to say that movements north of the border did not have specific demands or contexts, but that those took place in the wider framework of the British wide class struggle. This analysis is important when looking at the issue of the Highland Clearances, which have their parallels with the enclosures movements that drove the English peasantry off the land and transformed them into wage labourers, predominantly in the cities. McKinnon explains:

The Crofters' Revolt effectively signalled the end of the Highland Clearances. Overall, they were undoubtedly a political defeat but there was clearly significant resistance to the capitalist class. [Marxist historian] Neil Davidson argues that they were unquestionably a 'historical crime' carried out by a rapacious and 'triumphant capitalist class' with a 'disregard for human life', They were not, he points out, 'inevitable' in the sense that the Highlands were peripheral to the profitability and success of capitalism across Britain. Therefore, they were not a consequence of the transition to capitalism but rather of its 'established laws of motion'.

This argument is important because, as several authors explain, Scotland is not oppressed by Britain in the way that (say) Ireland was. The Scottish ruling class merged with the English in order to develop capitalism together. 

The third part of the equation is the Labour Party. Labour in Scotland has gone from being almost the only show in town, to one that is in "steep decline and shows little chance of recovering". This decline is documented in Dave Sherry and Julie Sherry's chapter, which shows how repeated and systematic betrayals of their core voter by Labour nationally and locally created the conditions for sudden collapse. When this happened,

it happened very quickly, but in truth it was the culmination of forces that were in play since Labour's election in 1997, like Blair's Iraq war, Ed Miliband's advocating of 'austerity lite', and decades of Scottish Labour's dismal record in running major councils.

Even under Corybn Labour's position of supporting the capitalist Union, alienated even further those who saw Independence as being about a fight for a better society. The nature of Labour's betrayals, and the social movements that have taken place, means the mood for Scottish Independence is dominated by left ideals. That's not to say, as several authors in the collection emphasise, that the country is immune to the far-right or racist populists. But that one of the reasons that socialists can be positive about developments is that there is a real desire for progressive change - and very often this is manifesting itself on the streets through mass movements. 

This however poses a problem for the neo-liberal SNP, who want a capitalist Scotland able to compete on the global scale. As Gluckstein and Fotheringham note, once you understand this contradiction,

a number of perplexing questions can be answered. For example, why is the SNP, which clearly craves an independent Scotland, so hesitant in going about winning it? Why, when All Under One Banner mobilises hundreds of thousands in marches for independence, does the SNP keep them at arms length, or grudgingly send the odd speaker but little more?

The authors highlight a parallel with Marx's comments on the passivity of the German bourgeoise during the 1848 revolution when they were wary of over-throwing the old feudal order. The reason was that if they "confronted feudalism and absolutism, it saw [also] pitted against itself the proletariat". Engels continued elsewhere, that the German bourgeoisie "attempted an impossible arrangement aimed at postponing the decisive struggle." While the Scottish working class is in no way in a revolutionary mood at the moment, the fear of radical ideas and action clearly haunts the SNP leadership.

Basing itself on the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, the authors in this volume put a powerful case for a Marxist position on Scottish Independence. It should be added though that this is not a crude regurgitation of what Marx and Engels said. Rather these are nuanced attempts to learn and apply lessons from the past to the current situation. It is worth finishing this review with Gluckstein and Fotheringham's conclusion. They argue that the Scottish capitalist class wants independence, not because they are nationally oppressed by the British state, but because 

the social system is one in which individual units... of capital compete with each other... For the Scottish bourgeoisie, full sovereignty at Holyrood is a path to greater competitiveness. On its own this would not garner any widespread support. So independence is framed in terms of expanding democracy.

Thus the demand for Independence sees the coming together of two different class interests, but both sides have different desired outcomes. So Gluckstein and Fotheringham continue:

The fight for [independence] has the potential to 'grow over' into something even more ambitious. For the true essence of permanent revolution is about how a socialist challenge to the existing order cannot be achieved in just one country. It needs internationalism rather than nationalism.

This nuanced approach characterises all the essays in this book. Debates around Scottish Independence are going to be a key political issue north and south of the border in the coming years. Socialists of all stripes will stand to learn a lot from this excellent book, that places the question of Independence in a wider context - the struggle for socialism.

Related Reviews

Devine - The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed
Hunter - Set Adrift Upon the World: The Sutherland Clearances
Hutchinson - Martyrs: Glendale and the Revolution in Skye
Sherry - John Maclean
Berresford Ellis & Mac A'Ghobhainn - The Radical Rising of 1820

Peter Berresford Ellis & Seumas Mac A'Ghobhainn - The Radical Rising of 1820

April 2020 was the two hundredth anniversary of the forgotten "Scottish Insurrection" of 1820. First published in 1970 for 150th anniversary, this book seems to be the only popular account of the Insurrection and for that reason alone it should be celebrated. One reason the Scottish rising of 1820 is ignored is that it took place in the shadow of the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester the previous August. Yet the conditions that led to that mass protest and state killing were not confined to Manchester. Rather they reflected the great anger and frustrations of huge sections of the British working class at their conditions of life and the lack of popular democracy.

In Scotland however there was an additional factor - the Union with England. The book begins by looking at the history of the union and shows how popular discontent in Scotland often manifested itself in the radical traditions of Republicanism and Independence. The end of the 18th century saw a growth in radical ideas driven by the French Revolution. In Scotland radicals were inspired by Irish radicals. For instance Wolf Tones' well known United Irishmen had their counterpart in the United Scotsmen. Growing Scottish discontent in the early part of the 19th century led increasingly to the growth of radical movements that sought to break from English rule. By 1820 these movements had searched the point of support where leading figures considered a revolutionary break with Britain as distinct possibility.

If radicals believed it, the English authorities certainly did. Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth had an extensive network of spies embedded in the movements, and it seems likely, effectively controlled the main leadership of the movement in and around Glasgow. These spies, like they did across Britain in the same period, encouraged rebellion. It is well attested that such spies tended to do more than simply report activity. If they could provide evidence of potential rebellion they were more likely to get paid, and by encouraging rebellion among disaffected workers, they could make their prophecies true.

They also gave the authorities license to crack down. In April 1820 it came to a head. A week of discontent, protests and, crucially, mass strikes exploded. The radical movement had, despite the spies and agent provocateurs, had built a large network of activists and sympathetic workers. ON Saturday 1 April 1820 a Radical Committee placarded the streets of Glasgow and a strike exploded across much of Scotland's industrial areas the following Monday. A group of badly armed workers marched towards iron works near Falkirk, south of Scotland with the aim of seizing more weapons. They had expectations of meeting much larger revolutionary forces marching from elsewhere. At Bonnymuir they encountered British Cavalry, who overwhelmed the workers, killing capturing them. The expectations of mass numbers of revolutionaries had been concocted by spies, and the small numbers surprised the authorities and the rebels alike. Nevertheless the state had to have its blood and several rebels were selected as examples - two leading figures John Baird and Andrew Hardie made defiant speeches from the dock, but they, together with another leading radical James Wilson, were executed.

There is no doubt there was mass popular discontent. The scale of the strikes and the huge protests that were put down by bloody violence show that. There was clearly less of a mood for insurrection, and the small numbers that did rally to a more revolutionary flag did so because they were persuaded by spies who hard to work very hard to encourage them. The authors of this book make it clear that the executions of some of the leaders and the transportation of many others was the result of a gross distortion of justice. Indeed the actual trial itself was illegal as the authorities ignored the niceties of Scottish Law to push English convictions on the men. The fact that everyone was pardoned a few years later demonstrates the gross injustice.

Nonetheless, I was struck by the defiance of those convicted and the solidarity from the Scottish working class. I also noted that the jurors themselves stood up to an intimidating judge in their refusal to convict some prisoners. Nonetheless I was disappointed that the mass crowds at the executions didn't storm the scaffold and free their heroes.

There is little history about the events in Scotland in 1820. This is, as the authors explain, mostly to do with the importance given to events like Peterloo in 1819. The stressing of English history in the British Isles means even those of use who think we know a lot of our radical history ignorant of events like this. Welsh radicals will no doubt remind us that few today remember the Merthyr Rising of 1831, the repression of of which was as bloody as Peterloo or Scotland in 1820. As such, this is an excellent piece of history which should be read in this, the bicentenary of those cruel events.

Related Reviews

Hutchinson - Martyrs: Glendale and the Revolution in Skye
Devine - The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed
Hunter - Set Adrift Upon the World: The Sutherland Clearances
Hutchinson - The Soap Man: Lewis, Harris & Lord Leverhulme

T.M.Devine - The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed

I had the pleasure of reading Tom Devine's new book The Scottish Clearances on holiday on the Isle of Mull, near where, it turns out, he wrote at least some of the book. It is a sobering experience when you look out on the landscape which he describes in the introduction like this:

The Scottish Highlands, contrary to the image projected in countless tourist brochures, are not one of the last great wildernesses in Europe but in many parts can be more accurately described as a derelict landscape from where most of the families who once lived and worked the soil are long gone.

This history is never far from view in the Highlands. The region is littered with abandoned homes, farmsteads and villages. Devine explains that contrary to much popular belief, it is wrong to see this "derelict" landscape as the product just of the infamous Highland Clearances, but rather of an extended process of change that took place across Scotland. This change has been neglected in both academic and popular history, and Devine's book aims to rectify this. Devine explains the broader context:

The Scottish experience of rural transformation was a national variant of broader developments in Europe. A primary determinant across the Continent and in Britain as a whole was a sustained revolution of increasing population which soon generated immense pressures on traditional modes of food production... different nations and regions took a wide spectrum of roots to agrarian modernisation... In Scotland, and much of mainland Britain, the pattern was different again with landed magnates deploying their power to introduce far-reaching changes from above. Some of their decisions resulted in dispossession of traditional rural communities on a large scale.

This is a detailed work of history, and space precludes a summary of much of the book. Devine's account of the evolution of the clan system in the Highlands is one of the clearest I've read, and sets the context for the behaviour of both the landowners and the mass of the population later in the book. But Devine argues that by the early to mid 1700s, at least for some of the chiefs, "the ethic of clanship was already being subordinated to the pursuit of profit." In the aftermath of the 1745 rebellion it was the "pacification" of "Gaeldom" by the British Crown which effectively led "many of the elite entirely to throw off this historic responsibility in favour of the material advantages of proprietorship, so completing the transformation to landlordism." It is this that sets the context for all the later agrarian developments in Scotland.

Scottish agrarian history can be loosely understood by breaking the country into three parts - the Borders, Lowlands and Highlands. For geographic and climatic reasons the areas differ a great deal, but also have many similarities and Devine argues that the divergence between Highland and Lowland agriculture begins through the 17th century.

The border country however was the first to suffer "improvement", something Devine describes as a "forgotten history". He writes that:

Two generations or more before clearances began north of the Highland line, the dispossession of many tenants and cottars was already under way in the hill country of the Borders...in a social revolution which has long been mainly ignored. The proximate cause was the expansion of large sheep farms, often with flocks averaging between 4,000 and 20,000, and the parallel growth in ther districts of extensive cattle ranches.

Devine's detailed exploration of why this takes place - best summarised as the desire for landlords in a developing capitalist economy to make more money - is brilliantly researched and reported. He never forgets that the development of the economy and the improvement of agriculture is closely associated with the brutal, forced transformation of peoples' lives. Nor does he neglect the resistance to this. One thing that marks the book (and has been noted by other authors of Scottish agrarian history) is the role of song and poetry in recording the impact of the dispossession. Here's one ballad responding to the changes:

The lords and lairds may drive us out from mailings [tenant farms] where we dwell
The poor man says: 'Where shall we go?'
The rich says: 'Go to Hell.'
These words they spoke injests and mocks
That if they have their herds and flocks,
They care not where to go

While discussing the "Leveller's Revolt" in the 1720s, Devine makes an important argument against those 18th century commentators and some historians today. He argues that resistance (such as mass protests against enclosure including the levelling of fences and hedges) was not "simply conservative" and against all innovation. Rather protesters were against "large-scale enclosing of cattle parks and the effect this had on the common grazing ground and arable lands of the small tenants". This is a point that also applies to rural protesters during similar changes in England, where protest was more about protecting existing rights rather than opposition to all change. The agricultural poor where, by and large, ignored when landowners decided to "improve". Though it's worth noting the Devine highlights a number of occasions when landowners did not do this - either through a remnant of a belief in responsibility to their tenants or because they baulked at the dispossession of whole communities. In the end this made little difference as their sons usually had few such compunctions.

By 1830 Scotland had dramatically change, but still retained vestiges of the past. In that year most Scots people still lived and worked in rural areas. But, as Devine notes "stress on continuities" hides the "unprecedented social changes" that had taken place in the previous 70 years. While most still worked the land, how they did so had been transformed.

In the Lowlands most of the rural population had already become a landless proletariat who hired their labour power in the market to employers... In the western Highlands a 'peasant' society remained but differed radically from that of the age of clanship... Indeed, social transformation in Gaeldom was more traumatic and cataclysmic than anywhere else in Scotland. The Highlands moved from tribalism to capitalism over less than two generations... Everywhere, large-scale pastoral farming was in the ascendant.

The ruling class in Scotland, Devine argues was "conservative politically" but "revolutionary in the economic sphere". This drove forward capitalist expansion, and destroyed traditional communities and social-relations on a huge scale. The destruction was sometimes explicit and in other times and places "by stealth". Most of the Lowland areas where, for instance, cleared gradually through depopulation and emigration. Thus the actually height of the population decrease is not, as commonly believed, during the Highland clearances, but afterwards as the final transformation of the countryside takes place. Though I must highlight Devine's argument that it was never emigration that depopulated Scotland, rather it was the "internal mobility within the countryside".  People where moving to find work and this they found in "the interaction of village and town development, agrarian specialisation and the spread of rural manufacturing and mining communities".

In England in 1830s there were mass outbreaks of discontent among rural populations, the most well known of which was the 'Captain Swing' movement. This had no echo north of the border. The quietness of rural Scotland at the time was well noted, including by William Cobbett. Devine argues this has much to do with the differences in employment relations. Agricultural workers in England being much more independent of their employers than in Scotland. Their contemporaries he says had more stability and crucially were "guaranteed food and shelter" but this was only provided for those in employment which gives a little incentive to risk unemployment. Contracts in Scotland were longer which Devine argues was partly due to the way that urban industry was competing for workers. Thus a surplus of unemployed agricultural workers in England led to instability. This explanation seems attractive, but I'm not entirely convinced - I think that Swing in England was driven primarily by a response to economic conditions, but also influenced by revolutionary events in France, the Reform movement and a long tradition of resistance to the employers. In other words the situation is much more complex than simply about unemployment rates.

Minor disagreements of nuance not withstanding this is an amazing piece of historical writing. Devine convincingly shows how the development of capitalism in the three differing areas of Scotland created the landscape we know today, and he shows how this led, over a period of centuries, to the transformation of the enormous rural population into wage workers, or emigrants. Devine writes clearly about quite complex changes, but never loses sight of what these changes meant in terms of ordinary people. If you want to understand Scotland beyond the picture postcard images of hills and glens then read T.M. Devine's book.

Related Reviews

Richards - The Highland Clearances
Hunter - Set Adrift Upon the World: The Sutherland Clearances
Kerr Cameron - The Ballad and the Plough
Hutchinson - The Soap Man: Lewis, Harris & Lord Leverhulme
Hutchinson - Martyrs: Glendale and the Revolution in Skye
Hobsbawm & Rudé - Captain Swing

Penny McCall Howard - Environment, Labour & Capitalism at Sea: 'Working the Ground' in Scotland

Working at sea in the fishing industry is 115 time more dangerous than the UK average. It's a startling statistic, that is usually explained by the idea that the sea is "dangerous". But Penny McCall Howard's important book is a detailed examination of why this is an incorrect explanation. More than that, it is a brilliant anthropological study of the lives of those on the west coast of Scotland who making a living from the sea. Howard shows how human labour is part of shaping an ecology which is far wider than just the "prawn monoculture" they fish.

Many of the classic works of anthropology are written by observers who maximise their distance from their subject. In his classic studies of the Nuer people of Southern Sudan, E.E.Evans-Pritchard wrote detailed accounts of his subject's lives, but always remained an observer. Howard too is an outsider, but she doesn't remain aloof from the fisher communities that she is writing about. An accomplished sailor she works with the men (they are all men), joining their small fishing boats or working on trawlers. As such, this is an intimate account of labour at sea, and how it is shaped by wider environment and economy. Howard explains her framework:

I focus on people's labour as what ties environments, people and tools together as they work to make dishing grounds productive. I take a phenomenological approach that focuses on people's experience of their own labour, including the results of that labour, and the aspirations and hopes that they pour into it. As a result, this book challenges the popular conception of the sea as a hostile wilderness...I explore the more complicated reasons why human-environmental relations at sea are fraught with ruptures, tensions and contradictions, tragedy, unfulfilled hope and even desperation.

Howard says that in the communities she studied, fishers feel in "a state of siege".  One fisher told her that "if you are trawler-man you think everyone is out to get you". This should be of no surprise - one of the consequence of heightened environmental awareness in the general population is an understanding that we are facing a biodiversity crisis and this is commonly understood to be particularly an issue for sea-life. Indeed the week I write this review the Guardian carries an article by George Monbiot which has the unfortunate headline "Stop eating fish. It’s the only way to save the life in our seas". It's hard to see any of those who Howard writes about here as seeing this as anything else as an assault on their livelihoods.

Howard begins with the nature of labour at sea, tracing it's impact on the environment, the process of shaping the "grounds" themselves and how wider, social relations, transform that experience. In one anecdote, she notes how an experienced fisher complains about having to go to the toilet at sea in a bucket, while the owner has spent tens of thousands on new navigation equipment to improve his chance at a profit.

All workers become intimate with their environments - whether it is a computer network, a phone call centre, the fields an agricultural workers frequents or fishers who "work the ground". The word "ground" is important. Howard says that she has noted more than 80 uses of the word - which means far more than, say, the sea-bed. Instead "what linked these places was the productive labour that took place in them. The ground was a place that afforded fishermen better catches and where they found their work to be productive. The affordances of grounds were not static and they were historically inextricably connected to the labour expended there."

Crucially, she continues, "fishermen re-shaped the affordances of grounds through their work and developed new tools in order to further develop the affordances of grounds." It brought to mind Marx's statement that "Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature".

Howard shows how fishers have a complex relationship with the grounds they work. To understand their labour as simply bringing fish on-board a ship in a net is to misunderstand the intimate relationship with the sea. This is not a romanticised view of life on-board ships, rather its the way that years of experience allow the fishers to develop very clear understanding of the sea, its tides, its depth and the seabed. Using this information (often obtained through careful watching of equipment screens, but also through feeling the vibrations of the boat and its equipment) workers are able to make decisions about how, where and when to fish. Some areas might bring a bigger catch, but be risky for expensive equipment, other places might bring smaller fish in bigger quantities which require more labour to prepare. All of these decisions take place in the context of the wider, capitalist, market which might mean a fish that was extremely valuable one week is almost worthless the next. Grounds then, "are places where affordances are intentionally developed in particular social and economic context, and through often improvised actions with particular conditions of satisfaction."

Howard draws on the work of environmental geographer Neil Smith who argued that humans "create nature". Howard shows how fisher's labour transforms the environment. For instance, she quotes one fisher saying "if you come across a piece of ground with a lot of skate, first you have to fish them off, and that's when you will find you start to get a good fishing of prawns." Howard continues: "Trawler skippers saw themselves as intervening in ecosystems to make them more productive of the prawns or crabs they fished for."

Thus those critics who might simply see the fishing industry as exploiting a pristine environment are incorrect. Fishers are part and parcel of shaping the ecology that they labour in. In fact, fishers almost always see their labour as making a positive contribution. That is not to suggest that the consequences might not be destructive, but to show how the actual catching of prawns is the result of wider social interactions. This was drawn out for me by Howard's discussion of the working practice of the skippers of the boats she worked on. They would often keep up a constant radio and 'phone chatter with other skippers, sharing information with others. So the work was intensely co-operative - a "community of practice" as Howard puts it. But skippers could also conceal and hide information. They might be fearful that someone else would undermine their catch at the market, or get fish that they might want. So wider capitalist social relations shape the relations between the working boats and their crew. Something also seen in Howard's brilliant discussion of technology - as alluded to earlier, technology at sea is usually about maximising profits, not improving the lives of those who work there. I don't have space to draw this out further, but Howard's conclusion is important. Technology, she explains, arises out of and then shapes, the industry:

The effects of technologies must be examine din the context of the transformation of sea creatures into valuable commodities with a variable price in faraway markets, and the alienation of fishing crew from any ownership relation with a boat and from the sea as a source of reliable livelihood.

This is also true of the relations between workers. Technology allows the better exploitation of the environment. But it also means that the job becomes more deskilled, and boat owners can employ cheaper labour. The final chapters of the book look at what this has meant for communities and crew, particularly through the hiring of immigrant workers on very low wages. Class differences have, as Howard is careful to emphasise, always existed in the fishing industry. So the system of shares that determines pay rates on many boats doesn't arise out of some historical communal system, but out of a system of multiple ownership of boats. Today that means that crew will often receive low pay for long hard work, and sometimes get nothing if the trip itself is not profitable. It is a system open to exploitation, but one where it is difficult for workers to organise collectively.

This returns me to my starting point. The horrifically high level of deaths and injury in the fishing industry is not the result of accidents. It is a consequence of the job "as currently organised" where boat owners cut corners on maintenance and safety to maximise profits, or crew must risk going to sea in a extreme conditions in order to make enough money to pay rent or loans. Returning to the work of Neil Smith, Howard shows how the "ideology of nature" means that the natural world is seen as outside the lived reality of people - something to be used and exploited. But capitalism makes the sea more dangerous for workers. As Howard points out the idea of a "hostile and dangerous sea naturalises the deaths of those working on it, no matter what the real cause." Deaths are seen as a result of the sea itself, not the system that exploits those who work it in the quest for profits.

Howard's book is a remarkable piece of work. It's a first rate piece of Marxist anthropology that puts human labour at the centre of a discussion about ecology. It shows how the biodiversity crisis in the oceans is related to wider social relations, and emphasises again how the fight to prevent environmental destruction requires challenging the priorities of the system - not just changes to our diet. For radical environmentalists and Marxist ecologists this should be a required read, and I'm pleased to see that a cheap paperback is to be published soon.

Related Reviews

Smith - Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space
Carson - Under the Sea Wind
Clare - Down to the Sea in Ships
Rediker - Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Lymbery - Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were

Lillian Beckwith - The Sea for Breakfast

During three wonderful childhood holidays in Scotland in the 1980s I was introduced to the enormously popular Lillian Beckwith books by my father who was a great enthusiast for them. I don't really remember much about reading them then, but retained a memory of warmth for the semi-autobiographical works. Beckwith moved to the Scottish islands as a rest cure and lived there for many years wirting a series of books about her life there. It is difficult to know exactly what is true and what isn't.

During more recent trips to Scotland I've tried to find them again, but they didn't seem to be in print, so I was pleased to find a couple recently second hand.

Unfortunately, my warm memories of them are somewhat dampened. What in the 1980s surely felt like humorous insights into isolated communities felt today, all too like the prim and snooty commentary on people whom Beckwith liked to play for laughs. While the stories are amusing, and no doubt fictionalised to a great extent, Beckwith enjoys to highlight the stupidity, daftness and simplistic logic of her characters - playing them for laughs rather than insight.

A quick glance at online reviews shows that many people read these for what they believe are insights into traditional ways of life in the Scottish Hebridean islands. Yet nothing really bad ever happens in this book. Sure there are hints at adultery, rows and peoples "simple life" is emphasised (a code for poverty in my experience), but really this is a fantasy about life in those places.

I am not surprised by reports that the community that had welcomed Lillian Beckwith into its arms was upset an angered by the books. I also doubt that she intended to cause offense, but this very much feels like middle class anthropologist going to the working class and having a very patronising smirk at their funny ways.

That's not to say there isn't stuff of interest. But this tends to be from what is said as background rather than the individual tales the author writes. I was fascinated to hear that people regularly ate Cormorant, for instance, and I was struck that the Hebridean population did not celebrate Christmas particularly and the children seemed to have invented a form of "trick or treating" long before American culture swamped western Europe.

All in all a disappointing return to a childhood classic. There's a lesson there!

Related Reviews
Cameron - The Ballad and the Plough
Hutchinson - The Soapman
Richards - The Highland Clearences

James Hunter - Set Adrift Upon the World: The Sutherland Clearances

This study of the part of the Highland Clearances that took place on the Sutherland Estate in the first quarter of the 19th century makes for an important new book. James Hunter locates the Clearances, infamous for the role of Patrick Sellar and the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford (later the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland), not as part of an inevitable economic development, but as a brutal part of the class struggle in the Scottish Highlands between landowner and tenant.

As a consequence the author shows how the modern Scottish landscape, enjoyed by thousands of tourists every year, has been fundamentally shaped by this struggle. A landscape that resulted from centuries of farming, was in turn transformed by sheep farming and a later switch to grouse and deer. Thus the "natural" landscapes are not natural in the slightest, they are the result of centuries of human labour and the victory of a tiny number of landowners over thousands of farming families. The homes, schools and churches that were used by thousands of people now lie buried and forgotten with the soil itself tainted by the blood spilt during the evictions.

Hunter notes that the Clearances had their origin in the way that capitalism was transforming how landowners could make money. This meant that those who wanted to "improve" the land and make more money were

rather like settlers on some North American frontier... at the cutting edge of an increasingly commercialised civilisation's advance into a region where older forms of social organisation remained the norm.... The clash, to be sure, was a lot less violent than analogous conflicts between homesteaders and Native Americans. But the issue at stake in this Sutherland collision was the same as that posed by North America's frontier fighting: which of two incompatible ways of life was to prevail?

It would be wrong to take this analogy too far. The tenants of the Sutherland Estate were not hunter-gatherers, or even pre-industrial societies. Nonetheless their methods of farming and their social organisation were a barrier to the maximisation of profits from the land. This is not to say they were backward, primitive, lazy or perpetually poor (all accusations thrown at them by the improvers and their propagandists). In fact, one of the strengths of this book is that it demonstrates the exact opposite.

Those at the forefront of the evictions, like Patrick Sellar, used this propaganda to justify to the world what they were doing. Describing those being cleared from land their families had farmed for generations as "barbarous hordes" and "aborigines" was to justify the same sort of terror that had been deployed against Native Americans, First Nations peoples and other victims of colonialism. And terror it was. The deaths, the destruction of "homes, barns, kilns and mills" in defiance of the law, the burning of homes with people still inside, the abuse of due process and the deliberate destruction of materials so that those evicted lost even the chance of rebuilding elsewhere was nothing less than terror.

Today, the scale of the Clearances still has the power to shock. In 1819 to 1820, for instance, some 5,500 people were forced from their homes in Sutherland. In one part of the estate, between 150 and 200 distinct communities were replaced by a mere eight landholdings. Many of those evicted ended up in far inferior coastal locations were they were expected to take up industries (like fishing) of which they had no knowledge and in unsuitable locations, lacking harbours to supplement meagre incomes from the smaller and less arable new plots of land.

It is no surprise then that people fought back. The book opens with the story of a mass protest that turned away surveyors. Real or threatened protests, demonstrations and the possibility of violence clearly terrified the landowners and their representatives (though not the potential for violence against former tenants). The scandal caused by the first set of Sutherland Clearances provoked enormous criticism of the Staffords, aided by journalists and campaigners across Britain.

There's no doubt that in an era of popular anger at government and the ruling class (James Hunter notes that military force was not used on a number of occasions because the army and government were frightened of another Peterloo) there was massive sympathy for the inhabitants of Sutherland.

Because the resistance was unsuccessful, former inhabitants were spread "adrift upon the world". Hunter traces those who ended up in North America and Canada, and their struggle to survive the passage across the Atlantic and the harsh winters. Many of these families eventually thrived, and there's a poignant report from years later, of some of those who remained in Scotland wishing that their families had made the trip.

Despite the bumper profits to be obtained from sheep farming, it didn't last. The arable land that initially provided for fat animals was the result of years of careful farming. When the soil fertility dropped, so did the sheep profits and a switch to grouse and deer was the only way to maintain profits. This did little for the landscape however, which continued to be empty. As one commentator wrote in the 1840s, after travelling through the area:

All is solitude within the valley.. except where, at wide intervals, the shieling of a shepherd may be seen; but at its opening, where the hills range to the coast, the cottages for miles together lies clustered as in a hamlet. From the north of Helmsdale to the south of Port Gower, the lower slopes of the hills are covered by a labyrinth of stone fences, minute patches of corn and endless cottages. It would seem as if, for twenty miles, the long withdrawing valley had been swept of its inhabitants and the accumulated sweepings left at its mouth, just as we see the sweepings of a room sometimes left at the door. And such generally is the present state of Sutherland.

The land had been, "improved into a desert". Karl Marx, an observer from afar of the Clearances, noted that "the history of the wealth of the Sutherland family [was] the history of the ruin... of the Scotch-Gaelic population".

James Hunter ends by pointing out that the present emptiness of the Highlands is something of a strange aberration and that one day the places that had been cleared will be full of people again. While this may or may not be true one day, it is an important reminder that the countryside we take for granted is not necessarily a pristine one, but rather is in the process of constant change. The Clearances, like the Enclosures in England that cleared landscapes, destroyed communities, and transformed people into wage labourers, were part and parcel of the emergence of a system that puts people before profit. The importance of James Hunter's book is that it shows this was not inevitable, nor necessary. In doing so he rescues the stories, and frequently the names, of those who would otherwise be simply remembered as victims of the greed of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland.

Related Reviews

Sharp - In Contempt of All Authority
Hutchinson - Martyrs: Glendale and the Revolution in Skye
Cameron - The Ballad and the Plough
Richards - The Highland Clearances

Roger Hutchinson - Martyrs: Glendale and the Revolution in Skye

Karl Marx wrote at length about the nature of capitalism. But he also described capitalism's birth "dripping in blood". In Capital, he described how, in order for capitalism to develop, it first had to destroy the historic relationship between people and the land. He wrote:

The spoliation of the church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made the soil part and parcel of capital, and created for the town industries the necessary supply of a “free” and outlawed proletariat.

In Britain, the Enclosures and the Highland Clearances are bywords for the violence and destruction of entire communities as land was repurposed in the interests of profit. What is less well known is that rural communities frequently fought back, and in the case of Scotland, where the Highland Clearances took place in a later era than the bulk of the English enclosures, this resistance had a major impact - forcing government intervention and eventually legislation that gave crofters more rights than they ever had. While this was too late for thousands who had been forced from their homes, sent over-seas or made to work in the factories of Glasgow, as Roger Hutchinson's recent book shows, the resistance meant that thousands of crofters were able to live in safer and more secure circumstances.

Hutchinson's book focuses on one amazing story of resistance in the 1880s, that of the community in Glendale in the western most part of the Isle of Skye who through prolonged rent strikes, physical battles with the police and eventually military occupation eventually forced their landowner to improve conditions and reduce over-crowding. One of the key issues was that families forced from their land elsewhere were causing over-crowding, but rather than blame these people, the Glendale crofters turned their wrath on the landowner.

The solidarity and unity of the community in the face of fierce repression is inspiring. Hutchinson notes that

The communal nature of their daily lives - the work at the peats, at fishing at fathering and shearing - had taught them since childhood to act together, to put aside petty individual differences in the interest of an essential common cause.

But those on rent strike were also not prepared to let anyone break their unity. Acting, as Hutchinson says with the "rough discipline of a revolutionary cell", they wrote in a notice posted in the Post Office

Any one of the tenants at Skinidin who will pay the rent, not only that his House and Property will be destroyed, but his life will be taken away or anyone who will begin backsliding.

The same notice informed the landlord that his animals must be removed from what was seen as communal land that could be used by the crofters, "at Whitsunday punctually, if not, they will be driven off with full force".

So strong was the movement that Glendale effectively became a no-go area for representatives of the law. The men and women of Glendale drove off fifty police officers under Sherrif Ivory, a man who never forgave them for his humiliation, with stones and the contents of chamber pots and prompted a Glasgow newspaper to publish a satirical poem based on Tennyson,

Missiles to the right of them,
Brickbats to the left of them,
Old wives behind them
Volleyed and floundered.
Stormed at with stone and shell -
Whilst only Ivory fell -
They that had fought so well
Broke thro' the Island Host
Back from the mouth of - well!
All that was left of them -
All the half-hundred

With Glendale effectively declaring autonomy from Britain, the government had to act. Leading figures, including John MacPherson who became one of the most important and eloquent spokespersons for the Crofters, were imprisoned though their court appearances helped them spread their message. The Glendale rent-strikers received support and solidarity from communities across Scotland and the eventual deployment of hundreds of marines and armed naval ratings (on two occasions) must rank as one of the most ridiculous and inappropriate uses of military power in an era in which the British government was not afraid to use over-whelming force against unarmed opponents.

The struggle was eventually victorious and was instrumental in forcing the government to introduce a Royal Commission into the situation. When this proved limited in its recommendations and the Glendale crofters found that their circumstances did not improve, they continued their fight. The Crofters Act failed to redistribute land as the now Highlands wide movement demanded. The Radical Crofters Party MPs who were elected to Parliament on the back of this movement refused to vote for it. But the Act did give enough to mean that the Glendale strikers were proved to have been paying too much rent and eventually, the land they were fighting for was nationalised and sold to the Glendale community.

Hutchinson neatly brings the story up to date, putting the Glendale victory into the context of other, more modern legislation aimed at supporting the Crofting communities of Northern Scotland. He doesn't however romanticise the period, or the lifestyle. This was a hard, physically demanding and poverty stricken life. But the Crofters were not weak willed, passive victims, they were men and women whose strong communities were frequently prepared to resist those sent against them by the greedy landlords. This wonderful rich history of the Glendale Martyrs and their resistance is a must read for anyone trying to understand Scottish history, as well as the larger changes that have taken place in British rural communities.

Related Reviews

Hutchinson - The Soap Man
Richards - The Highland Clearances
Cameron - The Ballad and the Plough