Reviews
required reading ... not to be missed for its fearless and comprehensive grasp of the past and its relevance for today'
Ileach
Eric Richards is a fluent, lucid writer'
Herald
About the Book
The Highland Clearances stands out as one of the most emotive chapters in the history of Scotland.This book traces the origins of the Clearances from the eighteenth century to their culmination in the crofting legislation of the 1880s. In considering both the terrible suffering of the Highland people as well as the stark choices that faced landowners during a period of rapid economic change, it shows how the Clearances were one of many 'attempted' solutions to the problem of how to maintain a population on marginal and infertile land, and were, in fact, part of a wider European movement of rural depopulation.
In drawing attention away from the mythology to the hard facts of what actually happened, The Highland Clearances offers a balanced analysis of events which created a terrible scar on the Highland and Gaelic imagination.
The Author
Eric Richards
Eric Richards is Emeritus Professor of History at Flinders University, Australia and previously taught at Stirling University, Scotland. His published work includes an acclaimed biography of Patrick Sellar, which was awarded the prize for Scottish History Book of the Year (1999) by the Saltire Society.You may also like…
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Hardback | Pub: 10 Oct 2019£20.00
Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2019 When Scotland’s 1846 potato crop was wiped out by blight, the country was plunged into crisis. In the Hebrides and the West Highlands a huge relief effort came too late to prevent starvation and death....
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Paperback | Pub: 23 May 2019£9.99The Highland Clearances are a well-documented episode in Scotland’s past but they were not unique. The process began in the Scottish Lowlands nearly a century before, when tens of thousands of people – significantly more than were later exiled...
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Paperback | Pub: 11 Aug 2016£14.99Winner of Saltire Scottish History Book of the Year 2016 They would be better dead, they said, than set adrift upon the world. But set adrift they were – thousands of them, their communities destroyed, their homes demolished and burned. Such...
