Domination: Chapter 6

6. SCOTTISH HIGHLAND CHIEFS: FABRICATING BROKEN MEN & BROKEN CLANS

The Lowlands and the English

In the eleventh century the Scottish monarchy was centered in the Lowlands and except when raids of Highland marauders into the Lowlands spurred punitive expeditions by the king, the Highland clan lairds (chieftains) were left to run their own affairs.
This was to change drastically as, over the next centuries the Crown badgered some and enticed some lairds into forsaking their obligations as custodian chieftains. Others remained hostile to the English and Lowlanders, a stance that culminated in the Jacobite Rebellions of “Fifteen & Forty-Five” (1715 & 1745). We will eventually be looking at those lairds who were transformed into compliant Crown supporters and believers in progress. Contact transformed them into greedy landlords, as Robert Dodgshon has so admirably shown in his book: From Chiefs to Landlords. Eventually many lairds became absentee landlords living in the Lowlands and even in faraway England, a country that was an abomination to many Highlanders.
What you will see in this chapter is how office-holders – the lairds – reacted to new opportunities in changing historical-material conditions and altered the nature of office and how they treated their constituents – their clansmen.
The Highlands, with few roads, rugged mountains and unproductive land had not held much interest for the Lowland Crown based in Edinburgh or English entrepreneurs before the rise of capitalism. Sporadic contact was made before the eighteenth century but it was not till later that interaction between Highlanders and Lowlanders reached a violent climax in the Battle of Culloden where the Crown defeated the Jacobite rebels.
After that, Lowland politicians and businessmen conspired to invade the Highlands and establish large estates that they reasoned would be productive moneymakers. Progress was the Enlightenment fever that was sweeping the British Isles. Robert M. Gunn sees a poleconomic reason behind the union of the parliament of the Lowland Scots and that of the English. He notes that a "few powerful merchants, bankers and businessmen in the Lowlands" had an interest in this merger. The lives of the men, women and children of the Highlands would be changed forever as these interests superceded those long established in the heart of the Highland clan.
In the 1700s, the Highlands of Scotland came into increased contact with the poleconomy of the Lowlands and England. While many chieftains resisted the encroachment on their clan-based way of life, eventually that contact was to transform the office of chieftain and undermine the principles of clanship. Furthermore, contact eventually displaced millions of people from their homelands in the infamous clearances, wherein rapacious estate owners emptied their lands of people to make way for profitable sheep. To do this aggrandizing lairds schemed and ran rough shod over clan mores and institutions.
This is a story of how these greedy chieftains sensed new opportunities and fabricated novel ideas and more oppressive ways of ruling their clans. Eventually they forged a whole new Highland poleconomy, one that was less communalistic, more market-oriented and devastating to community values.

Highland Clan Chiefs

Before Highland clan lairds were transformed into avaricious property-owners, they were interested in maintaining good political relations with their tacksmen (“good-men” or clan élites close to the laird) and their tenants. Highland lairds were closer to “influence chiefs” than “authority chiefs.” They interacted daily with their subaltern clansmen. A chieftain when asked as to the rent of his estate replied that he could raise 500 men. This was what was important before contact – followers not rents or the amount of land held. People counted. This was the chieftains’ source of power – the goodwill of followers.
Under the traditional clan system, the laird was a redistributor chieftain, the titular head of his clan. He certainly received renders in kind from his clansmen, but he also had the responsibility to care for them when shortfalls struck. There were three customary instances when chiefs were expected to help those beneath them: (1) at times of impoverishment, (2) when tenants could not find the wherewithal needed for payment of dues connected with a holding, (3) and when a disaster such as a storm caused production problems. It was the chief's responsibility to keep his clansmen happy and productive by shifting resources and redistributing food between different parts of a clan territory during times of crisis. The laird also organized and maintained defensive structures to protect tenants from invasion by hostile military forces and roving bands of highwaymen. Harvests could be erratic and life was insecure, so paying fees to the laird was a form of social banking. Both the laird and the tenant were investing in social relations to enhance their mutual security. Frequent face-to-face interaction, communal feasting, drinking bouts, fighting side by side against outsiders – all fostered a sense of accord.
Highlanders were known for their fierce parochialism. The humblest Highlander believed himself to be "a gentleman, having blood as rich and old as his chief." Highlanders of whatever rank supped and drank together, sharing a common name, clan and heritage. Prior to contact, there was a strong sense of community based on clanship.
In pre-contact Highland clans it was the concern of every laird to surround himself with as many followers as he could muster. His importance and power of injury and defense were reckoned by ruling over a militaristic following. His yearly income was unimportant as a status indicator. The number of men he could bring into the field to fight was. For this reason, families from “broken clans,” those that were disbanded by the Crown or those that had fallen on hard times, were welcomed into thriving clans in the early years before sheepherding became so important.
Prior to 1746, the Highland economy was not a money economy. To achieve security one invested in social relations rather than land or cattle. The laird, his family, his cattle and horses, could easily be assaulted, so his security depended on his political relations with clansmen and to a lesser extent with neighbors. Neighborliness, however, tended toward inter-clan hostility most of the time. Clan unity and prosperity was of paramount importance. The key indicator of this was grounded in the chief’s ability to multiply his dependents. That is, land was simply considered space where clansmen could be placed by the laird, not something seen as productive on its own.
The laird had to maintain good intra-clan relations by providing protection for his followers. But he also relied on sentiments created by this interaction and the power of time-honored customs creating allegiance. The laird was the "father of his people." He ruled based on tradition and immemorial paternalism. Protection and obedience were counter-posed. The ruling laird was said to be lineally-descended from the old patriarchs, but sometimes a man in line for this office would be passed over for a more capable man. Ability to lead trumped blood.
If the laird lost his estate, he still held the allegiance of his clansmen. If he lost his principal supporters, he was doomed. Prior to 1746, kinship bonds (often fictive) held the people together and those bonds tied them to certain territories. The laird was the custodian of the land, which was communally owned by the corporate clan. He did not hold alienable rights over the land. The laird was the representative of the people. Fictive or real kinship united the clansmen, who held a common patronymic. Property was only a vessel for loyalty and kinship was the language Highlanders used to discuss this subject.
Since ancestry was so important, being a validation for claims of privilege and support, the Highlands were known as a land where "almost everyone is a genealogist." Nevertheless, ancestry could be set aside when a descendant proved unworthy of office and many “broken men” were quickly and easily given kinship status since a laird’s power and prestige was measured in how many fighting men he could muster.
Some chiefs, even against the wishes of the invasive English state, felt bound to protect and provide for their followers and resist change. This was a traditional system based on principles of communalism: “If, by increase of the tribe, any small farms are wanting, for the support of such addition (the laird) splits others into lesser portions, because all must be somehow provided for; and as the meanest among them pretend to be his relatives by consanguinity, they insist upon the privilege of taking him by the hand wherever they meet him (italics original in The Living Conditions in the Highlands prior to 1745; my insert).” Thus, the lairds and his followers were co-dependents who lived by an ancient moral code, one that they thought would never change.

Outsider Views of Highlanders

Before the defeat of "Bonnie Prince Charlie" (Charles Edward Stuart – 1720-1788) at Culloden in 1746, the people of the Scottish Highlands lived according to a set of laws that had nothing to do with the market, the Lowland Crown or English values. Lowlanders and the English saw Highlanders as barbarians, often referring to them as "wild Irish." Gunn says, "The Highlander had retained his native Irish tongue (Gaelic), manner of clothing and was by every aspect very Gael and very Celtic." To say the least, there was culture clash between the mountain people and Lowlanders.
The Crown and those in Lowland society clearly looked down on Highlanders as primitives. Writers sympathetic to the new poleconomy of industrialization wrote that Highlanders lacked respect for Crown authority and about the “evill dispositioun and barbaritie of ye peopill.” Writings of the day spoke of the Highlanders in terms not unlike the pejorative phrases used to describe the “savages” the English encountered in their colonies.
Some writers were more sympathetic, yet appalled at the backwardness and lack of “progress” in the Highlands. It is common to find in the writings of English visitors to the Highlands statements about the terrible poverty there. They marveled that, in spite of the paucity of goods, the people seemed happy, apparently content with their clan system. What amazed these urbane passersby was the human side of communal work and the satisfactory nature of living together while sharing common values, norms and presuppositions.

Traditional Hierarchy

Communalistic sentiment aside, traditional Highland society was hierarchical. The clan chief was at the top of a pyramidal structure. He bound his principal supporters to him with lavish displays of feasting, leadership in battle and giving favor and support to those below. Immediately around the chief were his "household men" and "fighting men," his tacksmen. Chiefs also supported craftsmen or those with specialist roles by allocating them holdings "by way of gift." Those artisans skilled at making weapons were especially welcome. Below this immediate retinue of the chief were the tacksmen who acted as middlemen in controlling tenants who formed the bottom tier of society.
The lairds were custodians of their followers, but they were also war chieftains, responsible for organizing the clan as an élite fighting force. Clans had a history of combat and sacrifice – ultimate values for the society. Beyond combat, top lairds were also quite good cattle traders. Cattle were about the only commodity lairds could get to Lowland markets, as they didn’t have to be carted there. Such feats have been chronicled in Rob Roy MacGregor: His Life and Times, which was made into the 1995 film starring Liam Neeson.
However static this communalism may seem, it was a traditional base upon which some would build betrayal and exploitation, rules that could be fiddled by acquisitive lairds intent on conforming to the new norms of English life and the market economy. Novel opportunities for these leaders provided the fly in the soup for common Highlanders.
Traditionally, tacksmen were allotted land by the laird based on the nature of their relationship and the kind of service they had provided the laird. Tacksmen were often close relatives. Their material renders were nominal. The laird-tacksman relation was based on custom and sentiment. When the clearances came, the tacksmen felt them to be a "gross and unfeeling injustice," since they lost their privileged middleman position. Tenants were also dismayed as they sometimes received their land directly from the laird, but more likely from a tacksman. However, some tacksmen became as greedy as any laird. Opportunists of all stripes respond to the chance for leverage and material advancement.
Also tenants sometimes let out part of their holdings to sub-tenants or cottars, who paid their rent by devoting most of their time to the cultivation of the tenant’s farm and the tending of his cattle. The small cottar parcels were called pendicles. The tacksman tried to keep the size of his pendicles as small as possible to increase the number of men on whom he could call. Thus, the stratification system was:
Laird
Tacksman
Tenant
Cottar
Pendicle rent was paid in service, kind and by a small sum in coinage when such was available from sales in the Lowlands. The pendicles were very small and it was difficult for a cottar to subsist, especially since he had to pay rent and provide service to his superior. The relationship was mildly exploitative, no doubt, with the flow of value being cottar  tenant  tacksman  laird; but on the other hand, the cottars, tenants and tacksmen had security under the system, as did the laird himself. The rules of the system had evolved to spread risk and maximize security in a harsh land, where there was much inter-clan raiding and where the weather often caused crop failures.
But as history has shown, the tenure or security of subalterns in the system was dependent on the Highland lifestyle continuing as it had in the past. When new poleconomics came into play, the weaker members of the clan lost their land and security and the stronger ones became landed aristocrats in the Lowland system. Under the old lifeway, the laird could not severely exploit his people. As lairds were drawn into the market economy new opportunities to generate extreme exploitation opened up.
The dues paid in the old system were, however, based on a system of hierarchy e.g., the payment of thirlage (or multure), a due exacted from each tenant. All the tenants of each clan parish were thirled or bound to take their grain to their laird’s mill. The miller kept out a certain proportion of grain as a tax payable to the laird. The thirl due was from one-sixteenth to one-eighth, and sometimes more. In the same way many clan parishes were thirled to a particular blacksmith. These and other exactions went to the support of the laird and his inner band of men.
Clansmen were burdened with the obligation of giving presents to the chief at stated times and of paying calps (best beast) to him at the time of a family death. This was the duty of heriot, the “last payment” and was the diagnostic of subordination to a chief.
However, the laird was also a redistributor. He kept a reserve of wealth to provide for all with any claim on his hospitality. Also, he was expected to rescind debts by poor cottars in arrears every five years or so. In some sense, then, these were symbolic renders to uphold the hierarchical relationship between laird and cotter. Furthermore, the dues paid him were chiefly consumed in feasts given at the homes of his tenants. All participated in the eating of the recycled dues, which consisted of mainly beer and food. Rather than detract from the human side of their patron-client relationship, these payments enhanced them and the laird was respected when he showed that he valued his dependents through frequent personal contact, feasting and commensalism. We will see a similar situation with the Count of Barcelona and his sworn men in chapter 8.
In the Statistical Account of Boleskine and Abertarff, Invernessshire, we get a view of the system of tenancy:
The whole country, with two exceptions, consists of a variety of half davoch-lands, each of which was let … by the Lovat family or their chamberlain to a wadsetter or principal tacksman, and had no concern with the sub-tenantry; each sub-tenant had again a variety of cottars, equally unconnected with the principal tacksman; and each of these had a number of cattle of all denominations, proportional to their respective holdings, with the produce whereof he fed and clad himself and whole family (Quoted in: The Living Conditions in the Highlands prior to 1745 (Part 1)
http://www.electricscotland.com/history/working/index.htm).

In the traditional clan system of Highland Scotland tribute payments to the titular chieftain probably functioned as a form of social storage against disaster. After all there was a crop failure reportedly once every three years and even when arable cultivation in the region was at its zenith about 1800, it is likely that it only covered around 10 per cent of the region's land surface. In this system chieftains used what they gathered as renders to generate secondary circuits of exchange. Part could be used to support craftsmen and the making of prestige goods, which only chiefs or the senior members of a clan could access. They also used such wealth to create favorable marriage alliances.
Highland chiefs had to cope with either an excess of land relative to their followers or a deficiency and they were constantly using various strategies to balance the two extremes. One way to increase personnel and territory was to build up canopy clans, bringing several disparate clan segments under their control.
Sometimes, chiefs granted out blocks of land to their sons or to the most senior cadet branches of the clan establishing them as vassals. At other times, they rented out large districts to tacksmen, with senior members serving as overseers, or fir-tasca. This meant that the physical topography underlying chiefship was overlaid by a social morphology, with cadet branches being established in an ever-widening circle around the original laird, each being more progressively removed, in terms both of kinship and of physical proximity, from the center. Dodgshon notes that once in place, these cadet branches began to fill their lands with kinsmen by a process of downward genealogical emplacement. However, this process was invariably a “partial, incomplete affair,” with non-kinsmen being granted land on an equal basis with kinsmen.
 
Feasting and Feuding

Part of the way in which Highland little chiefs established and maintained their power base was through chiefly display, a materialization of their privileged positions as clan leaders. This was done in three basic ways: through feasting, feuding and the various forms of redistributive exchange that centered on chieftains e.g., marriage exchanges and those designed to establish and maintain alliances between groups. The thread common to each of these was food, its production, distribution, conspicuous consumption, display, theft and destruction (the latter in raids on enemy clans).
We can see the importance of both food and chiefs in the curious custom whereby a member of McNeil of Barra's household would climb to the topmost turret of Kisimuil Castle after Chief McNeil had finished a meal to proclaim to the world that now that the chief had finished his meal, the rest of the world could start theirs.
Again, the food/chiefship linkage appears in land agreements. Charters issued by the Lord of the Isles began with the words: "I Macdonald, sitting upon Dundonald give you right to your farm from this day till to-morrow, and every day thereafter, so long as you have food for the Great Macdonald of the Isles." Dundonald hill had contained settlements for about five thousand years and was considered a special place, upon which the ancestors of the Stewarts of Dundonald initially built a “motte and bailly, then a castle.” Note the words: “sitting upon Dundonald,” which would have been meant to lend credence to Great Macdonald’s command.
These activities rested on the cultural assumption that "if their chief lived well then so did the clan," a proposition that was materialized in conspicuous displays of feasting and the practice whereby a chief's tenant had to provide hospitality for him and his retinue, the cuid-oidhche custom.
The cuid-oidhche was about reaffirming the laird/clansman linkage, but with the decline of clan values after contact it was transformed into an exploitative practice called sorning, the usurpation of chiefly rights with or without the chief's knowledge, often by roving bands of displaced tacksmen. At times, the chief's armed men would swoop into a community and demand "hospitality" in what amounted to a form of extortion. Because big chiefs had larger entourages, what come to constitute a household was open to interpretation. A chief could show up in a community with a retinue of six hundred men and expect to be fed and housed.
Chieftains wanted land to build prestige. More land meant more followers and an enhancement in status because more land allowed the laird to control more clansmen. A chief who lost land, lost followers and status and his clan was considered a "broken clan." During the period 1493-1820, there were ebbs and flows in landholding. The culture of the lairds was based on a love of power and prestige, both of which could be bolstered by controlling people and land. Raiding and feuds were the natural result of this culture. Chiefs fought over land. Some clans prospered, others became broken, their scattered remnant populations attaching themselves to energetic clans. As we shall see below, after contact land took on productive and re-sale value.
Chieftains used a variety of strategies to get land and cattle to maintain the hierarchical system. Until the Crown interceded, inter-clan raiding was common. Much of the early land was land held by the sword. There were also tacks or attached lands, which came to a chief in various ways e.g., through marriage alliances, bonds of friendship or legal arrangements such as manrent. Competition for land, followers and prestige was endemic to the Highlands and the coming of the Crown and the market economy did little to diffuse such conflicts.
Lairds strategized to create marriage alliances to get land and heirs and to extend fictive kinship to non-clansmen. The intent was to increase their following. The kin group was really a fiction, not a true consanguineous clan. More than a vertical genealogical structure, clans were lateral networks of relations of kinship, affinity, friendship, neighborhood and hegemony.
The harsh environment of the Highlands set life up as a zero-sum game. Feuds and raids were common, hence the need for manrent relations. In a region where subsistence was at premium, the eradication or theft of a rival clan's food base made a forceful symbolic statement. Given the scarcity of food it was tantamount to murder. To steal their cattle and grain, or to lay waste their lands, was to enhance one's own capacity to survive. The motto could have been, "If they lose, we win." Imagine the symbolic value to a conquering chief who had just stolen or destroyed his rival's property and then held a lavish feast, a display of celebration and superiority that would not have been lost on his supporters. Indeed, in their feuds Highland chiefs were "fighting with food."

Moving, Joining & Attracting: The Quest for Followers

Clan instability can be seen from two glaring facts from the census data of the Scottish Highlands. First, people were rarely in one place for very long. They would link up with a clan for a while, and then move on, perhaps creating a new tie by adopting the name of the new clan. Chieftains encouraged an inflow of clients, for example, the Laird Fraser of Lovat offered a "boll of meal" to anyone taking his name, showing that subsistence was at a premium and that chiefs used redistribution to build up stronger clans. Again, Isabel Grant notes that, according to the Gartmore manuscript of 1747, adopting the name of a clan chief was a common practice when the name-taker also took land from the chief. It was the "custom of chiefs," the manuscript goes, to oblige all the farmers and crofters that got possessions on their lands to take their name. In a generation or two the name stuck.
Thus, there were constant shifts of residence and name changes. In fact, people were quite adept at forging putative links through pedigree faking. This was good for people in need and good for the chief who needed people to work his land and bolster his clan's size. Dodgshon sees the Highland clan as what I might term a "strategy structure," a fiction useful to men in control and to those seeking to create more lasting ties to power. Given the way in which the layout of many clans was in a constant state of flux, it is doubtful whether any but the smallest and most localized segment of a clan could claim true unity of kinship. Clans were seen as generalized kinship structures, which, in the right circumstances, could add or drop members through the “mere expediency of using or discarding a clan name.” These constant turnovers, in labeling and propinquity, indicate that clanship was a strategy used by both chiefs and commoners.
Chieftains and landlords in the period 1493-1820 were both looking for increase, but different kinds of enlargement and by using slightly different strategies. Dodgshon notes that:

At the start of the period under review, c. 1493, if not at the end, Highland landowners still saw themselves as chiefs rather than commercial landlords. Admittedly, most of the period is taken up by the transformation of one into the other, at first slowly, and then, by the mid-seventeenth century, rapidly…(In the beginning) Highly chiefs saw themselves, first and foremost, as trying to maximise the social product of land rather than its cash returns, pure and simple. … The reason why the increased labour value of food production increased its social value for chiefs lay in how they used their control over subsistence to build status (my insert, 1998:55).

In short, while later on landlords tried to squeeze more marketable product out of marginal land, in the beginning chiefs were interested in packing their clan lands with more and more people. They did this to gain prestige and power more so than profits and they did so in four inter-connected ways: (1) by extending the number of their clansmen; (2) by increasing their people they amplified the total amount of renders and rents received; (3) by showing greater production from marginal land, thus increasing their ideological value; and, (4) by translating collected “in kind” rents into public displays of giving, thereby further enhancing their positional security.
 
The Traditional Economy & its Transformation

In the Highlands, as a rule, farmers cultivated the ground on the system of run-rig, i.e., the ground was divided into ridges that were distributed among the tenants so that no one tenant possessed two contiguous ridges, growing oats and barley and flax. Also, no tenant could have the same ridge for two years running. This was designed to spread the risk and fostered common interests. The tenants would join together to protect the land against the ravages of cattle that were allowed to roam about the hills and also against the depredations of hostile clans.
Produce was not marketed outside of local marketplaces because it could not be economically carried to Lowland markets. Around 1760, the Highlands were visited by Dr. Walker who wrote of the terrible state of the roads and limited transport capability there: “The want of proper carriages in the Highlands is one of the great obstacles to the progress of agriculture" and since they have "no carts, their corn, straw, manures, fuel, stone, timber, seaweed, and kelp, the articles necessary in the fisheries, and every other bulky commodity, must be transported from one place to another on horseback or on sledges.” He felt that this poor state of transport "must triple or quadruple the expense of their carriage."
With increased contact, some lairds began to market their goods in the Lowlands, especially mobile cattle. They needed cash to pay taxes and operate as entrepreneurs. Some moved to the Lowlands and even to faraway England. They became absentee landlords. This was a good time for such lairds. From their distant great houses they could instruct their estate managers to do this or that and in many cases this brought a bonanza for them. Professor Devine says that most owners achieved what were essentially windfall gains from many sources of profit – kelp, cattle, wool, mutton and regimental recruitment. These “profit centers” did not require significant investment but wealth accrued to the landlord simply because of his rights of lordship.
Later came a heyday for those supplying goods and men to the Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815). Sending Highland men away to fight distant battles was, however, a drain on labor supplies for households and others were being moved to the coast to work in the kelp industry, yet others went to work in the Lowland factories or emigrated to America. In fact, there was “an enormous hemorrhage of people from the region” according to Devine.
For those who remained, there were great changes as well. A new farming class was emerging. These were men who could acquire land and employ a larger number of landless and semi-landless workers. Even crofters, who held tiny plots of land, had to work for wages to survive. Now there were the distant landlords in their Lowland great houses, but too there were local men who were amalgamating plots to form large farms. Those who could were now able to exploit those who could not.
Estates were getting larger as people on small plots were replaced by sheep, cattle and larger fields where wealthy farmers began to practice “rational management” to increase output in order to meet growing demand of the industrial economy.
This was a time when men were coming to believe in the power of reason and social manipulation based on reason was seen as good and proper. It was the beginning of social engineering and the idea that social “betters” could rationally develop the “inferior” element in society. Highlanders could be moved about like so many chess pawns. Devine says that although the progress of pastoral husbandry had caused “immense social disruption” and the removal of customary populations, it did not often result in “planned or overt expulsion of the inhabitants.” That would come later. Instead relocation (especially in crofting townships) was the preferential policy so that profit could be extracted both from the labor-intensive activities of the crofters and from the more wide-ranging operations of the “big flockmasters.”

Commoner Resistance to Change

Tenants tried to resist exploitation. For example during the poor harvests of the 1690s, when grain prices were high, farmers used the excuse of poor harvests to try to escape paying traditional food renders so that they could divert grain into the marketplace. Landlords countered by debiting tenants with the monetary equivalent if their harvest prevented them from paying rents in kind.
Another example of the conflict between the lairds and their tenants came up in the attempt by the landowners to force their tenants to grind all their grain in mills owned by the estate, thereby having to pay to do so. This was a longstanding obligation, but since in earlier times there were few mills, it was unevenly enforced. By the mid-eighteenth century landlords increased the number of water mills to thirl or tie tenants to a local mill, forcing them to pay multures to the miller. The landlords passed laws prohibiting tenants from using private querns to grind their grain, although many tenants disobeyed this rule. When the lords were pressed by market circumstances, they in turn applied the squeeze to their subordinates, who in turn tried to dodge such pressure.
Robert Dodgshon sees this crackdown by landlords on milling income as part of a larger shift:
In fact, we can see this concerted pressure over milling as simply one of a number of ways in which landowners began to think and behave as landlords, putting in place strategies of management that maximised rental income. We can, for example, marshall a similar argument as regards distilling and brewing, and the efforts made by a number of estates over the eighteenth century to eradicate illicit distilling and to concentrate whisky and ale production at the growing number of official ale houses and changehouses that were erected by estates such as the Macdonald and Islay estates over the eighteenth century (1998:117).

Contact and Its Influence

The poleconomy of Highland Scotland was altered by contact with extra-local poleconomic forces. Drastic change came to the lives of the highlanders in the form of new economic opportunities, new requirements by English politicos e.g., the payment of taxes in English coin and new status opportunities for lairds.
When the English imposed state law over the Highlands, the lairds were caught between customary law and the imposed system. Customary moral codes eventually fell to the opportunities the market economy afforded certain well-placed lairds. They became extractive landlords, imitating the lifestyles of English barons. Additionally, English aristocrats, with the intent of establishing vast estates, occupied some Highland lands.
It is instructive that later, when the lairds were being drawn into the English system, the payments in kind were "ordered up” to the landlord’s habitation. Previously, the laird traveled about to visit settlements to receive their donations, an occasion that usually involved drinking and eating together. What was friendship at the first became very oppressive. For example, in the clan parish of Campbell of Auchinbreck, the laird had a right to carry off the best cow he could find upon several properties and the Island of Islay had to turnover five hundred such cows yearly.
However, previous to 1746 it was in the interest of the laird and chief tacksmen to keep clansmen as contented as possible and vice versa. Money was of little use in the Highlands then. The laird was pleased to be provided with a secure maintenance and a surplus for hospitality and war.
The traditional clan system was not without stratification and inequality, as through the ages some stratification had crept into the clan system. Chieftains and their families and "senior members of the clan" had unequal access to wealth, women and sumptuaries, but a crucial question is this: Did these incipient extractors, under the influence of the Crown, become full-blown extractor chiefs? Sadly, the answer is yes.
The laird system lasted longer in the Highlands than in the Lowlands of Scotland, where feudalism had taken over by the period 1493-1820. This was due to environmental negatives in the mountainous Highlands. The Western Highlands and Islands offered a poor bargain, with low returns on investment of labor and high costs. The harsh environment kept the Crown at bay, but in time the Lowland government worked to assert its authority over Highland clans whose territory lay deep within the heart of this harsh land. But rather than take over the lands, the state penetrated more slowly and established its power in the region by forcing local chiefs to acknowledge the Crown as their superior. They threatened imprisonment to force chiefs to sign documents asserting that they only held their lands by charter grant i.e., at the behest of the Crown. Some displacements did take place, some men went to prison and others died battling the Lowlanders.
In short, the English state co-opted Highland lairds, transforming them into landlords who no longer were simple redistributors, but who became extractors of rents and participants in the market economy. Charters or "sheep-skins" were granted by the Crown to Highland chiefs. One Hebridean chief visited Edinburgh to acknowledge the Crown as his superior. While there he noted that he had previously held his land on the edge of his sword against clan enemies, but he now held it on the skin of a sheep. In other words, such clan leaders became vassals to the Anglo-Norman Crown and a superficial form of feudalism was superimposed on the area placing a capstone of Crown authority over a pattern of land tenure that, in many areas, did not immediately change. No attempt was made to secure the region with conventional forms and institutions of military feudalism at that time, however.
When chiefs became exposed to newfound market opportunities and political and social prestige through contact with the English political economy , they responded like aggrandizers. Greed was unleashed. They became feudal lords because of this contact, but also because the chiefly base was there to build upon. Thus, chiefship and feudalism mixed, but the feudal behavior of Highland chiefs owed as much to the previous culture of clanship as it did to the imposed Crown system. Dodgshon says that when a chieftain, like Campbell of Argyll, granted out parcels of land to his “vassals,” they were to kinsmen and served only to define new branches of the clan, not to replace the values involved with new ones rooted “wholly in feudal service." It was feudalism with a small f.
This was a transitional state that would eventually evolve into full-blown ravenous landlordism and the infamous clearances, when estate owners, some of whom were chiefs or descendants of chiefs, threw the people off their land to run sheep, whose wool was in great demand by the new industrial mills of England.
Initially the clan system of land tenure and that of feudalism clashed in some ways. Under feudalism elsewhere the Crown established control over land through vertically defined ties between themselves and a vassal. In turn, those lords having usufruct rights over land offered protection and land parcels in return for military service from their vassals. But under feudal rule, the Crown was the ultimate landlord, and upon the death of a fief-holder, the land reverted to the state. Dodgshon says:
What mattered to feudalism, first and foremost, was the constant renewal of the Crown’s superiority over all men and all land, and the pledge of service given in return for grants of jurisdiction or land, not the continuity of particular families in particular fiefs or holdings. The resource demands of military and economic feudalism also need to be noted. Whether through the demands made in support of knightly service, or the demands made by a system of demesne production, feudalism was very much a system that operated best in fertile, arable areas. When it came up against environments like those of the western Highlands and Islands, the balance between profits and losses worked against it (1998:13).

Thus, because of the low-grade soil and bad weather, Highland landholding had been penetrated by some, but not all, feudal principles, with lairds holding their land from the Scottish Crown and letting it out to tenants in return for various dues, renders and even labor services. The clan structure remained the paramount means of controlling the economy and military service was not offered to the Crown until late in the day and then the Highland regiments were formalized and soldiers were paid a wage.
Traditionally, the clan system was based on a chief who collected foodstuffs to be stored as a collective fund. The laird kept this store in girnal houses (granaries), which were "a very potent symbol of a chief's position.” But change came on the winds of contact altering the nature of chiefship. Dodgshon puts it like this:
As the region was drawn more and more under the rule of central authority, and as its economy was subjected to the pressures and demands of a market economy, the coherence of the clan system and its economy was gradually undermined. In its place, there emerged two contrasting and conflicting systems of production. As their political role was curbed and as their ideology of behaviour was transformed, and as the region was penetrated by market forces, chiefs became landlords. In the process, they had to cope with a different perception of the region, one which imposed an economics of distance and comparative advantage on their estates. The outcome was a growing evaluation of estate resources in purely economic terms and a gradual shift towards commercial stock production, a move that began with an emphasis on cattle production within both the estate and township economy. Chiefs, though, had to live with the consequences of past solutions. Many estates carried large numbers of tenants whose farm economies continued to be locked into subsistence strategies based on arable. As population grew, the demands of subsistence grew for the sub¬sistence sector, the limitations of environment continued to be overcome by throwing labour at the problem, ring-fencing the needs of subsistence against the increasingly intrusive realities of the marketplace. We cannot understand the changes that took place over the period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries if we do not understand how these two strategies of resource use evolved out of the ideology of the clan system and how they increasingly came into conflict by the mid-eighteenth century (1998:27).

Marshall Sahlins has said that pre-state systems organized territory through society, whereas state systems organized society through territory. In the former, territory drew its political structure and identity from the kinship, chiefdoms and kingdoms that happened to occupy it, naturally evolving in boundaries to fit organic social structures. In the latter, jurisdiction was organized through fixed territorial units. These were units of lordship and authority that determined a community's identity and its place within the political structure of things. Dodgshon places early Highland Scots in the former category that emphasized clanship over territory as the prime principle of organization, though clan chiefs were always looking to expand their territory. He says:

Where the authority of central government was weak or spread thinly, order was provided by the authority which chiefs exercised over their clans. The Crown itself recognised this fact. Not only did it work through the clan system by co-opting some chiefs to its cause, but it also tried to control lawlessness in the more difficult areas by holding chiefs responsible for their kinsmen or those who carried their name. So long as chiefs and their clans shaped political order in this way, their geography served as a mapping of socio-political order. To a degree, this had the effect of reducing the dynamics of socio-political order to the struggle over land. As a successful clan expanded its control over land through all the different devices available (i.e. Crown favour, marriage alliances, feuding, cattle dealing), and as it implanted such windfalls with loyal kinsmen or friends, its sphere of socio-political space expanded in step (1998:32).

Highland élites responded to contact with resistance on the part of a few lairds, but the majority understood that times were changing. Mackillop says that compared to their failure to manage Highland economic and social development, the lairds exhibited a sophisticated understanding of how British politics had been reconfigured by the emergence of the “fiscal-military” state. The region's élites constructed a distinctive and effective political strategy that sought to place the Highlands in a mutually supportive relationship with the foreign state.
Land tenure of chiefs and those under them was hazy in the pre-feudal stage of Highland history. It was based on oral contracts. Contact changed this loose way of life. The written word was part of the corrosive poleconomy of the Lowlands. By the sixteenth century most large Highland land owners held their land by Crown charter. At least in theory this meant that the laird was only a lessee, as were those beneath them – tacksmen, tenants, crofters and cottars below them.
But most of these landholders did not see themselves as simple tenants who had no allodial or freehold rights to land called a duthchas or kindness; they claimed customary entitlements, inalienable rights by virtue of their kinship status in their chief's clan. The Crown and custom clashed in theory but mixed in reality. The prevailing view of those low in the hierarchy was that chiefs did not hold rights of alienation over the land, but were merely custodians or trustees of the land, holding it in common for the clan members. The evidence is strong that this was the case, with some tenants reportedly refusing to accept written leases precisely because it undermined their customary rights to their holdings.
New exploitative poleconomic structures were built on older, less extractive ones. What we see happening as time goes by, and as the Crown and market inch in, is that Highland tenurial arrangements changed. It would be a mistake to see the system of early chiefly land tenure and privileges as locked timelessly into a particular form. Redistribution and display worked in one era, but social actors, who were constantly surveying the landscape of opportunity, assessed changing situations and made adjustments. Lairds changed with the times. As Dodgshon puts it, "old forms were given a fresher face and new obligations were accreted to old ones." That is the essence of fabricating domination: dropping old codes that do not help aggrandizers attain more prestige, power and property and adding new ones that do.
This goes to the heart of my argument that structures are forms in use, and as such are used and (can be) abused by status occupants. Structures of power are tools like hammers. You can use one to build something good for subalterns or hit them over the head with it. Institutions are received, reworked and passed on to the next generation of opportunists in a more-or-less altered form.
In the Highlands' data, we see different landowners in various places throughout the region using an assortment of tactics to try to meet similar ends. In other words, all office-holders, chiefs or lords of estates, were not in lockstep. They were each thinking through their options and opportunities, in light of the customs and laws of the time and new poleconomic opportunities to accomplish their goals.

Attempts at Cultural Genocide

Until its decline in the nineteenth century the Gaelic language (Scottish version) was the core of Highland culture. The distinctive marks of Highlanders – their dress, including the kilt, tartan, sporran, tam and dirk, was outlawed by the British government in the eighteenth century when it became alarmed at the rise of the Jacobites.
The Crown set out to squash former traditions and practices. Once the outside world began to impinge on the Scottish Highlands, those clans and chiefs that did not have Crown backing were, in the interest of establishing government in the area, defined as bandits, often for engaging in what had been accepted feuding prior to contact e.g., cattle “lifting.” Instead of a clan bidding for status by time-honored methods, they were now seen as a desperate wicked crew of brigands who pillaged and plundered the country people. Some clans were in; others were outlawed.
It is likely that the statues passed to eradicate the “barbarian” culture of Highlanders were more a reaction to changes already underway, than a cause of change, though the Crown clearly wanted to transform Highland culture quickly, as can be seen in the following quote by Cregeen:
It is commonly held that the old Highlands died on the field of Culloden in 1746, and that the subsequent statutes abolishing hereditary jurisdictions, military followings, Highland dress, and the rest destroyed the clan system. This is a naive and superficial view, which a study on any part of the Highlands would show to be false.
What destroyed the old Highland social and political structure was its growing involvement in the general cultural influence of their neighbours to the south, that is England and the Scottish Lowlands. This influence, expressed in speech, manners, clothes, religion, political sympathies and activity, trade, seasonal migration, and so on, was at work in the Highlands long before 1745 and reached its climax considerably after (1970:165).

Fabricating Rents from Renders

Modernizing clan chiefs were able to embed later rents into traditional institutions like the cuid-oidhche. A late sixteenth-century report on the Hebrides drawn up between 1577 and 1595, far from confirming that fixed, regular rents were in place across the region, gives the impression that chiefs or landowners in most parts of the Hebrides still relied on the irregular uptake of food renders in the form of the cuid-oidhche. This was the longstanding custom requiring tenants to provide hospitality for their chief and his household men. Significantly, the scale of food involved more than matched that of later food rents. Thus, the report notes that:
each merkland on Mull and Coll paid yearly '5 bollis beir, 8 bollis meill, 20 stanes of chese, 4 stanes of buttir, 4 mairtis, 8 wedderis, two merk of silver, and twa dozen pultrie, by Cuddiche (cuid-oidhche), quahanevir thair master cummis to thame'. Likewise, each merkland on the Uists 'payis 20 bolls victuall, by all uther customes, maills, and oist silver, quhair thair is na certane rentall'. It goes on to say that the 'customes of this Ile are splendit, and payit at the Landlordis cumming to the Ile to his Cudicht' (my inserts, 1876-1880:3:428).

Once such renders were established, the force of custom took over, giving later élites a base of exploitation from which to operate. We see progression from a state of variable or ad hoc payments connected to a possible visit by the big man and his followers to one of "certane rental" from a possibility that the lord and his men will stop by to collect, to a situation where each croft had to pay a fixed annual rent in kind. Later on, when the market dominated, this become a cash payment. We see this process of codifying rigid rents in Dodgshon's comment about the Crown's efforts at rent collection compared to early customary extractions:
By comparison, the early sixteenth-century rentals (1505 and 1541-2) show the Crown's attempt to turn such renders into regular food rents or, where conversions had occurred, their cash equivalent, during the two brief periods when it controlled the estate involved directly. We can glean a number of clues about this change from the 1505 rental for North and South Kintyre, the earliest Hebridean rental available. By 1505, all Kintyre townships are depicted as owing a fixed annual rent but beyond this general point, there are three different types of entry in the rental. First, there are a small number of townships whose rent appears to consist of a cash payment equivalent to their merkland assessment, usually with the addition of one or two minor payments in kind, such as cain sheep. Thus, Glenherf, a three merkland township, was set for three merks of money rent, whilst Newklach, a one merkland township, was set for one merk, a cain mutton and a stone of victuals. Second, some were still set either entirely or largely for a rent in kind, with substantial payments of meal, cheese, malt and stock, the latter comprising marts, sheep or pigs. Where such townships owed a small cash payment, it constituted barely 10-15 per cent of their total rent. At Lossyd, a five-merkland township, for instance, the cash portion of its rent amounted to just 10 per cent of the total paid, the rest being made up of meal, cheese and stock. Third, a small cluster of townships, eight in all, paid a sizeable cash rent, but not one that exceeded the value of their merkland assessment. In addition, they also paid a modest amount of meal, cheese and stock, equivalent in value to about 2O-25 per cent of their total rent. In each case, these payments of meal and cheese are labelled as le coddocheich (referring to the ancient custom of cuid-oidhche payments). Such variation suggests that at the point when the rental was compiled - Kintyre rents were undergoing change, one that was affecting different areas and different townships at different rates. Logically, the baseline for this variation is represented by those townships which paid all, or virtually all, their rent as a payment in kind. Such payments probably represent the food renders initially uplifted in the form of cuid-oidhche converted into a regular rent payment. Other townships had moved away from this baseline by having all or part of their rent converted into a cash payment (1998:58).

Similarly, Samuel Johnson, in a journey to the Highlands in 1773, notes the shift from custom to cash: “The chiefs, divested of their prerogatives, necessarily turned their thoughts to the improvement of their revenues, and expect more rent as they have less homage. … When the power of birth and station ceases, no hope remains but from the prevalence of money.” This had at least a hundred-year history. The Crown passed the Statutes of Iona (1609) to stamp out clan-based feasting and feuding, the cuid-oidhche institution and the bastardization of this, sorning. These statutes had the general effect of undermining the clan system and the authority of the chiefs, but rather than eradicating them, these customs merely were transformed into even greater burdens on tenants through a modified clan structure.
And this modification was not good for clan tenants. The Crown’s Privy Council attempted to force clan chiefs on the Isle of Skye and in the Western Isles to shift away from cuid-oidhche into regular rents. This had the effect of regularizing rents, but also it increased their cash component.
Chieftains still found themselves with large quantities of in kind renders, but now had to decide how they could be used. Either they could market produce themselves (which was difficult), or they could convert such renders into cash rents. Given the logistical difficulties of transport and collecting such renders and taking them to Lowland markets, the latter was the more rational response.
At the same time as chiefs were facing other burdens, e.g., the Statutes of Iona (1609) had forced chiefs to educate their sons in the Lowlands. This ensured that future chiefs acquired English tastes, which required profit and regular cash flows, often at a rate that their estates could not sustain. This led subsequent landlords to rebuild their castles, fitting them with finer and finer furnishings and new art forms. As lifestyles changed, they spent more time away from their Highland estates, succumbing to the temptations of cities like Edinburgh and London. Now they sent their sons to Eton and Cambridge.
Here we see some townships paying all their rents in kind, after the custom of cuid-oidhche; others in a combination of cash and kind; and yet others paying all in cash. For our purposes here, what is interesting is that once established, such customs could be altered to fit new circumstances, enabling new power-holders to continue the extraction process, siphoning off new forms of wealth from the people.
Furthermore, once the extractive system was in place, it was adjusted to the needs of the lords and chiefs, not the people. Note the implication in a simple statistic quoted in Dodgshon (1998:59): “Significantly, when we compare the cash rents levied in 1505 with those levied in 1541, all appear to have been increased by 50 per cent so that the cash portion of rents was seen as open to revision in step with market prices” (my emphasis).
The rent receiver (laird) was able to consistently adjust his dues to fit his needs and tastes and the changing marketplace. Only he had the power to extract or expel as informal payments were becoming formalized; in kind renders giving way to market-driven payments in cash, drawing the lives of crofters into a wider plane of impersonal economics which made their lives miserable.
Renders in kind could be oppressive in hard times as well. When chiefs and landlords "dropped by" to collect their dues from the crofters, payment in "victuals or food renders" was to be for the sustenance of the lord and his "household men," who could include a bevy of retainers such as storytellers, clan historians and genealogists, seanchaidhean, pipers and harpists. This, in addition to cooks, brewers and maltsters. In mimic of royalty, the nineteenth MacLeod of Dunvegan was even said to keep a fool.
These were payments in food that became a baseline for future rents. Politicos and landowners burdened their followers with a diverse bundle of payments and obligations, some being traditional payments while others were recently introduced or modified. Such payments were not fixed at first, and varied widely, presumably depending on circumstances and the ability of the community to negotiate their payments. Payments were by mails, that being a unit of land plowed. Payment of grain appeared to be about a third, but some had to pay bere (malt) payments as surcharges over and above what they paid in food. This may have been levied as a punishment, in any case, it shows how lords adjusted their rents to different communities and crofts. In addition to the grain paid as render, tenants were also obligated by custom to pay grain as “teind and multures,” to grind in mills.
While payments varied, the average seems to have been a third for the lord, a third for seed and another third for subsistence. It was not an entirely one-way payment. The chieftain provided his tenants with "seed, stock and 'strength silver' as working capital," that cash needed to bring the farm up to strength on a functional level.
Once lairds had become landlords, on a widespread basis, rents were variable, adjustable and became burdensome for many. Rent bundles that included marts, payments of livestock or their products and horses, were the most onerous of all and appear to have been a surcharge over and above normal rents extracted by the masters. Only selected townships were so burdened. On many estates, adding to the burden of marts payments were those of herezeld, or payments of cattle and horses the relatives of a deceased tenant had to pay. In addition to these regularized dues were additional ones labeled casualties or "goodwill presents." Such dues as presents, customs and casualties could be a simple basket of meal and must have grown up in ancient times and evolved through the years, for example, one payment called the "reik hen" was simply a hen from each house from which smoke issued.” In addition to payments in kind and cash, tenants also had to perform customary services for the lords, e.g., carting, plowing and harvesting.
Sometimes lords and masters were faced with logistical problems which caused them to alter their demands on people. For example, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when faced with the task of moving and marketing large quantities of mostly poor quality grain from the Highlands, the landowners offered it for sale to the very tenants who had grown it, as a way of avoiding the carting costs and converting kind into cash.
Cash became desirable when the market became a broad reality in the Highlands. Landlords wanted payment of part of the renders in the coin of the realm. They needed this to do business in the Lowlands and to pay their own Crown taxes. Cuid-oidhche dues could not easily be increased, but cash payments could be placed atop them, and once payments in kind were converted to cash, the latter was more easily adjustable. This tendency to add on a cash payment was so common that it had a name: an eik in rent was an augmentation and it was almost always calculated entirely in cash.
We have some indication that tenants did not feel that customary dues payments were fair and reasonable because when the Crown became a political factor in the region, we see that a petition submitted in 1613 by the Crown tenants of Islay to the Privy Council complaining that Sir Ranald McSorle Knycht and his “officearis and servandis in his name have begun to impost upoun theme verie havy burdynis exactionis and impositionis.”
What the chiefs and landlords might have seen such rents as their customary dues and renders, the townsfolk were calling "very heavy burdens, exactions and impositions." Referring to the 1613 document, Dodgshon notes that some "pinch" was being applied to the tenants: “One aspect of the complaint dealt with extra dues
being levied on all livestock grazing the common waste, and gives the impression that Ranald McSorle, alias Macdonald, may have squeezed tenants for as much as he could exact during his very short lease of the island following the death of his brother in 1611” (1998:72).
Food rents, by their very nature, were subject to the whimsy of weather and other crises. In the slippery climes of the Western Isles, tenants faced recurrent problems in meeting rent demands. Sometimes this led to expulsions, at other times it was worked out; but there is good indication that tenants had their ways of retaliating from what they considered unfair treatment e.g., hunting forbidden animals or going after the master's salmon.
It is important not to see dues and renders as fixed. Though the lords and chiefs wanted to maintain such customs, they also wanted some room to add new categories of goods, services and especially cash payments, as they were always in need of cash because only cash allowed them to operate in the Lowland marketplace. That flexibility came in the wide range of casualties that might be bound up with tenures. Occasionally, we get a glimpse the variety of goods involved, such as in a rental for Campbell of Glenorchy's estate (see Box 6.1).
With its mix of meal, bere, wedders, geese, swine, whisky, nuts, fruit and cloth, it captures the wide range of in kind payments that could bind tenants and their landowners within the framework of the traditional estate economy.
Food was both sustenance and symbolism in the culture of the Highlands, a way of staying alive and a way to enliven existence beyond the bare minimum. Absolute famine was not unknown in the region. In this cruel environment, food took on a special meaning. Poor harvests could mean starvation. Command over the surplus provided lairds with a powerful ideological weapon in their efforts to maintain chiefly status.
Lairds and landlords adjusted dues for some, e.g., craftsmen of producing needed goods were given free rent or discounted holdings. Food renders provided the basis for a primary circuit of consumption, which enabled chiefs to sustain kinsmen in times of crisis; to support their tacksmen; to carry on with displays of feasting and feuding and to build alliances through marriage and bonds of manrent with other chiefly families.
The variety of food gathered in through the cuid-oidhche or as rent imposed a template on the economy that was to dominate its character long after such customary renders had been converted into cash. Old structures became the footstool for new ways of accumulating wealth. The presence of food renders meant that when change came, landowners were well placed to redirect output towards markets and to make such redirections favor them and not those from whom they were making extractions. The accumulation over time of payments from tenants to chiefs set precedents for more exploitation under new and changing circumstances, with the landowners always being in a position of power over those who worked the land. In short, influence chieftains became extractive chiefs in the move from lairds to landlords. In this way, redistribution became exploitation.
 
Box 6.1 Breadalbane Estate: Summary of Rent (1670)
(Sources: SRO, Breadalbane Muniments, GD 112/9/24, Rentals of
Breadalbane 1669-78, 1670 rental in Dodgeshon 1998:77-78).
SilverMails£1236 14 08
Girsum £293 06 08
Blak Mairt
Silver £20 08 00
Meal 10 chalder 15 boils 1 firlot 1 peck 1 lippie
Bear 8 chalder 8 boils 111 firlots
Fedswyn 11
Wedders 52
Butter xxv quarts 1 pint
Geese 32
Capons vi dozen 10 wt
Poultry viii dozen and a half dozen
Fedkids viii
Lambs xiii
Aquavitae 1 gallon
Tallow iiii stone
Socking viii els
Girding xl els
Nuts i firlot
Apples & pears 1000 wt
Also militia money and loads of peat

Broken Clans – Broken Men

When poverty struck, some cattle-lifters or "broken" men, or men who belonged to no particular clan and who were regarded generally as outlaws, began to raid the Lowlands for cattle and other booty. Furthermore, there was a local practice called the watch, in which bands of men, for a fee (called watch-money), would guarantee no thefts to a landowner. Of course, it was both a service and extortion, as they would steal the cattle if they were not paid the watch fee.
Highlanders moved around a fair bit, leaving one clan and joining another or being evicted when clan lands changed hands. Allegiances were in flux. Highland chiefs contrived to build status and power through their control of land, its products, people and through various forms of conspicuous consumption. From the vantage point of the clansman, he could join or leave a clan by changing locale or by taking the name of an up-and-coming chief whose favor and support he wished to cultivate. Hence, chiefs had to be seen as augmenting their prestige, building a clan that could not easily become a "broken clan."
Tacksmen originally served as local managers for the chief, but as time passed and clans became “broken,” tacksmen got a bad reputation as being useless middlemen who raised the dues on those below them, squeezing more and more from them in rents, sometimes charging subtenants three or four times the normal rents. Dodgshon says:
To appreciate their predicament by the eighteenth century, we need to draw the distinction between the nature of a landlord-estate economy and a chiefly-estate economy. The former was designed to maximise rental income by maximising surplus output and forcing it into the marketplace. By contrast, chiefly-estate economies were organised to consume as much as possible within the social framework of the estate, to maximise food's social value, balancing that part which was fed into chiefly systems of redistributive exchange with what they received in return. In these circumstances, the fact that tacksmen were seen to consume part of what they gathered in as rent would simply have served the wider cause of the clan, establishing the status and well-being of the clan through conspicuous consumption. As close allies of the chief within a socio-political system, we can also understand why tacksmen were shown considerable forbearance over rents. Unlike landlord and tenants within a landlord-estate system, tacksmen and chiefs within a chiefly-estate system shared the same ends. If his own needs were secure, a chief had a vested interest in protecting the position of those around him, from his senior kinsmen, usually his tacksmen, downwards (1998:94).

In the world of broken clans, this traditional system was falling apart but some tacksmen clung to and abused their status through the practice of sorning.

Collusion with the Crown

Some clans fought the English, while others collaborated with them. For instance, the House of Argyll, the Clan Campbell, acted as agents of the Scottish Crown in destroying the powerful MacDonalds and other clans that were perceived as unruly. In linking themselves to the government they gained political clout and grew to be a powerful force in Scottish history. Their involvement with the Crown brought them honors in the Lowlands and infamy in the mountains. They became earls and later, dukes of Argyll, playing many parts, but all are in fact aspects of one constant role. It was that of drawing into modern life an area considered barbarous by the Crown – 'the Hieland, where nane of the officeris of the law dar pass for fear of thair lyvis'."
The Crown’s first commissioned lieutenantry was given to the first Earl of Argyll in 1475 to "carry out the forfeiture decreed against the fourth Lord of the Isles", a Macdonald. The work of destroying Macdonald influence was virtually completed by 1607, when the Macdonald clan structure began to come apart, the various lineages and fragments devolving into feuds and hostilities. As E. R. Cregeen points out, these feuds and cleavages were "skillfully fomented by the central government and by its agent Argyll."
As spoils for their stratagems, the lion's share of the Macdonald's possessions in mainland Argyll went to the Campbells who distributed them among their clansmen and allies and who extended their control over many of Macdonald's former vassals. By their destruction of the Macdonald lordship, the House of Argyll had roughly quadrupled their estates “extending over an area of something like 3,000 square miles by the end of the seventeenth century.
As hereditary sheriff of Argyll, the earl represented the law of Scotland in the West Highlands and was charged with the administration of justice and as the Crown's lieutenant (soon to become hereditary Lord-Lieutenant of Argyll) he had control of its armed forces and ample powers to use them with impunity.
Successive Clan Campbell barons were thus able to endow younger sons with land and in this way cadet branches (lineages tracing their descent in the male line) arose, scattered in an ever-widening circle around the original barony. In 1457 the Earldom of Argyll was created and bestowed on Colln Campbell. The earls held the highest offices of state, intermarried with leading families in Scotland, acquired fresh lands and established new lineage branches within the Clan Campbell.
The rise of Argyll and the fall of the clan system created much disruption in the Highlands with most of the people living on the Argyll estate owing their allegiance to a non-Campbell, a chief who was not their landlord. Thus we see the transformation from clan chiefdoms to estates ruled by landlords who owed their allegiance to the Crown. Furthermore, most of these new landlords eventually came to live outside of the Highlands, running their estates through managers.
Argyll’s cozy relationship with the government benefited a few but was harmful to many Highland clansmen. If we ask who was in a more flexible position to deal with the changes that were partially produced by the Argyll-Crown alliance, then the fact that Highland chiefs sold their poorer tenants as indentured labor in the American colonies should give us a firm answer.
When the clan system broke down, the Highlands became dependent on the leadership of the House of Argyll to broker its fate with the Crown and in the marketplace. Argyll had already moved into the mainstream of modern political and religious development, which bolstered its position in the eighteenth century as a middleman facilitating the process of economic and social assimilation of the Highlands. Former dependence on lairds was transformed into dependence on landlords and an external economy. As Cregeen tells us, "By the early nineteenth century, the economy of the West Highlands was almost wholly directed towards supplying cattle and sheep, wool, kelp, and labour to the southern towns (1970:166)."
The demise of ancient farming towns was accompanied by a new mobility; by emigration; by the rise of nontraditional villages and by an intensified activity in fishing and kelp-burning on the coast. These times also saw the emergence in many areas of what was in effect "a rural proletariat, engaged in wage-labour, kelp manufacture, and fishing, and occupying little or no land." Cregeen continues: “With this, new attitudes developed. For the chief, now frequently a non-resident landlord, with a son at Eton and a daughter doing 'the season', the claims of vassals and clansmen became irksome and irrelevant. They for their part gradually lost their affection and loyalty for the chief and looked to improve their condition elsewhere” (1970:167). Many a Highland chief was lured away from estate and clan, becoming involved in English politics and a quest for status in faraway places. Cregeen notes that indeed “the chiefs showed an almost indecent haste in assimilating the southern culture.”
The political activities of the Argyll lords made them normally resident in London so they only spent a few summer months at their Highland estates. In their social activities, tastes and lavish lifestyles they imitated the great Whig magnates and were always short of revenue. Through them the Crown was bent on civilizing the Highlands in the eighteenth century. This was the official justification for their actions, but at the base were sound political and economic reasons. We see the Protestant Ethic dripping from their desire to instill in the Highlanders new values: “The economic virtues of hard work, thrift, and sobriety were constantly urged upon the Highlanders, and were regarded by the Duke and his friends as an excellent antidote to Jacobitism and disaffection, which thrived in idleness and intemperance” (Cregeen 1970:168). The encouragement of such virtues, however, went beyond a purely political purpose. Industrious, sober, and enterprising tenants were required if the estate was to yield a steadily increasing income.
The second Duke of Argyll (r. 1703-1743), the famous "John of Battles", changed the tenurial structure of the Argyll estate, which in spite of rent rises, had remained indistinguishable from that of any other large Highland estate. He dramatically changed the whole basis of land tenure. First in Kintyre, about 1710, then on his other properties in 1737, he offered leases of farms in open auction to the highest bidders – whomever they might be. Thus he declared war on the tacksmen who claimed the right to such tacks based on hereditary rights.
What would have been unthinkable under the old system now became “rational” in market terms. The sub-tacksmen and sub-tenants could compete on an equal basis with their superiors. They were assembled and told that the Duke was trying to deliver them from the oppression of customary services and payments in kind and heriots by offering them nineteen-year leases on plots for which they would pay rent. Self-seekers sometimes paint themselves as do-gooders and populists. The duke’s real intent was to dismantle the clan system and create competition where their had been a cooperative bloc, which allowed him to deal with each Highlander individually, rather than as a group.
The transition to the market economy was in its final phase. Competition had been established as the dominant principle in the allocation of land, with clansmen being required to submit their bids for land on the same terms as non-clansmen. In the long term, the new criteria winnowed away many of the ancient families, some leaving the area, others staying to struggle on as "gentlemen farmers" and still others entered the market as cattle dealers.
Not only did the lease system fail, with rents taking 50% of the revenue in 1794, but also the tenants had no traditional system to fall back on and were thrown helter skelter into the labor pool of the market economy becoming a landless class. They were “broken men.”
Why would the men stay with estates when they could leave? Obligations may have been onerous but staying gave tenants a kind of security. The new world of the market offered only competition. Those that stayed on the land had much smaller holdings but for a while they were able to scrape by. Cregeen says that "the crofter emerges as the characteristic inhabitant of the coastal areas and the western islands, neither wholly a farmer nor wholly a labourer or fisherman." In the end, the locals were justified for their "insolence and outrage to which they are naturally prone" and for thinking that they were better off staying with the old ways because, while the Argylls thrived, the commoners and tenants got the short end of the stick.
And the stick was getting shorter. In the 1770s, cattle and sheep, which required less labor, were replacing farming as a mode of production in the Highlands. Whereas early Highland chiefs had invested in people; the new rationalized rancher filled the land with sheep. Since the move from farming to ranching was happening at a time when the area's population was on the rise, there was extreme pressure on the land and prices rose, as did rents.
The Duke of Argyll was the poster boy for maneuvering between the mores of the traditional Highland world and that of the English poleconomy. As a well-positioned estate owner he manipulated those in his debt or under his rule to his advantage. We need only look at the case of his clan, the Campbells, which had made a business out of supporting the Crown against local clan interests and those of the Jacobites who were anti-Crown rabble-rousers from the Duke's perspective. Cregeen notes that:
In return for their solid political support (no more than a handful of Campbell lairds ever went over to the Jacobites), the Duke rewarded them amply out of the enormous store of his patronage, though he diplomatically kept open a channel of army promotions for the Macleans and other Highlanders, as a means of converting them into loyal subjects of the king (1970:176).

Another means he used to pacify the lairds was preferred access to cattle of a finer breed from the Duke's parks. In addition to the carrot, the Duke also wielded the stick. The ringleaders of those rebels who resisted the Duke's plans were imprisoned for a time and upon their return "were excluded from holding lands."
The locals had an innate fear of losing their rights under the clanship system and resisted change as best they could. Perhaps the fundamental reason for the of lack of economic progress in Tiree (an island part of the Argyll hegemony) was the mistrust and hostility that the mass of the islanders felt toward the House of Argyll and which was the legacy of their historical role. Open resistance was rare after the disastrous battlefield defeat of the Jacobites in 1745, but there is evidence of smaller conspiracies, of a sullen apathy towards the landlord's enterprises and of malicious joy when any of the patron’s projects failed. “The whole attitude of the times is reflected in the saying, still current in the island: 'Mur b'e eagal an da mhail, bheireadh Tiridhe an da bharr' “ ('But for the fear of double rent, Tiree would yield a double crop').
Such local resentment seems to have been warranted in that in olden times they could meet face-to-face with their “lairds and maistres" but by the eighteenth century the Duke of Argyll, though interested in estate-management, directed the plowing, sowing, composting and marketing of his farms in the Highlands from his home in London and it was in the time of the fifth Duke (r. 1770-1806) that the Argyll estate finally emerged as an economic organization, its operations mainly determined by price levels in faraway markets. There was little left of the Highland character as a tribal or feudal kingdom.
With absentee landlords, more responsibility was given to their chamberlains or estate administrators (the sharp pencil guys) who came to fill the vacuum left by the departure of the tacksmen. Cregeen puts it like this:
With the increasing absence of the head of the Argyll family, the Chamberlain of Argyll, as the chief official, enjoyed greater authority. Each October, the Duke, with his Receiver General, would meet the Chamberlain and his colleagues or deputies at Inveraray (where the Duke had moved from London) to audit their accounts, hear business, and leave fresh instructions. Such instructions are usually fairly brief, and the Chamberlains retained a wide discretion of day-to-day administration. Though most of their business was concerned with the granting of tacks and the collection of rents and feu-duties, it also meant deep involvement in politics (1970:185).

But even the days of the chamberlains were numbered, as the market inexorably ground toward an approach to life that meant profits for those on high in the power hierarchies – the absentee landlords. These sweeping changes took place under the fifth duke. His agent in Edinburgh, James Ferrier, who was a paragon of business efficiency, carried out a drastic reform of the Argyll financial system. A novel type of estate management was emerging. The new managers had greater skill in accountancy, law, and practical farming. They had no clan affiliations or ties to the Argyll family. Their allegiance was to the market.
After 1800, only one Campbell remained as one of the five management positions of the estate. The fifth duke's own personal attention and the management of the estate combined with these changes to turn the Argyll estate into an efficient, up to date economic engine instead of a semi-tribal poleconomy (political economy). The evolutionary process of the House of Argyll was complete, beginning with power, ending with profit – a poleconomic victory for those at top, a disaster for the rest of the clansmen.
The new enterprises dreamed up by market enthusiasts mostly failed, both as profitable ventures for the élite, but also as income earners for the workers. What kelp production and other such schemes produced was poverty – planned, manufactured poverty. Each time a new economic opportunity arose, and tenants began to benefit from it, the landlords would raise their rents to be able to continue to exact their "due," and in some cases, rents were raised to drive tenants into new economic activities in order to create an income stream of cash payments to landlords. The idea was to keep the tenants poor enough that they had no options but to work for the estate managers and the lord.

The Infamous Clearances

Élites were changing the rules. To illustrate the security of customary tenure versus the new market-driven scheme, tenants who took up the duke's offer for leases based on rents were often ruined by the competition for land. More than half of the small tenants on the Argyll estate who received tacks from the Duke's accountant in 1737 lost them through insolvency. Furthermore, there was a broad and extreme instability in the occupancy of the farm, steadily rising rents, and a rapid turnover of tenants.
The House of Argyll tried to “improve” the lives of tenants, transforming them into producers of kelp for the industrial machine in England. After the collapse of kelp and agricultural prices in the 1820s, the Highlands, with a population in some areas double or even triple the level of 1750, faced a future of dire poverty, famine and massive emigration. The fate of those who had been “family” now faced displacement. Their lands were to become sheep-walks and sporting estates, supporting a dwindling and aged population, a few too old to migrate or try something new. They died bewildered in a new avaricious world. The Highland clearances left barren many vast areas, some of which remain so today and took away between 85% and 90% of the people.
Besides mass departure for America and the colonies, there was another avenue for Highland men, who had a reputation as good fighters. They were pressed into the service of the Crown and created the new Highland regiments. Some writers have claimed that the duke was bent on altruism, but we have seen that the exploitation of the market built on the ancient corporation of the clan with its feu-duties, its customary rights and duties. When material conditions in the world changed, chiefs perceived new opportunities and used the structure of clan leadership to transform themselves into landlords, not in a single lifetime, but gradually, a rule-change at a time, so to speak.
Perhaps the chieftains and lords saw it coming, for there is indication that the commoners did, with their conservatism and spirit of resistance. In any case, the market came riding in on the activities of the new breed of landlords who were able to reorganize their relation to wealth and labor in ways that benefited them, even though it hurt the average clansman.
Perhaps sensing the changes, lairds attached their fortunes to the new order of things, to the market and state, both grounded in distant centers, the principals of neither being very concerned about the lives of Highlanders. Thus the eventual exploitation-at-a-distance was built up slowly through time as exploitation-on-location altered Highland life, allowing the powerful to benefit and the weak to suffer, emigrate or fight for the Crown. Or die confused. At this point, sheep were much more profitable than people.
Those who were left behind in the Highlands suffered greatly. It was those with means who emigrated. The very poor cotters had to stay and eke out a meager living growing potatoes on tiny plots, hoping to pick up temporary wage-paying jobs here and there. Around that time, the land tenure situation in the Highlands looked like this:

Ownership % of Population
Owned more than 5 acres 14%
Owned an acre or less 51%
Owned no land 35%

Peripheralization had created a typical stratified society with a few large landowners at the top and the majority of the people perilously clinging to tiny fragments of land and insecure employment opportunities.
Even this precarious situation was to get worse as the rich and powerful began to move toward even more “rational management” of the Highlands. After the war boom, Devine notes, according to the logic of the market:
The land which was divided among crofters and cottars had now to be consolidated and made available for grazing for sheep-farming, the only sector which remained profitable. In 1827, the managers of the estates of the kelp lord, MacDonald of Clanranald in south Uist and Benbecula, resolved to reduce kelp manufacture and cattle rearing and concentrate on sheep and similar plans were being hatched on other Hebridean estates. These strategies demanded large-scale eviction of the now “redundant” population. Sometimes this took place, as in Harris, Lewis and parts of Skye, by moving the inhabitants of entire townships to areas of marginal land through displacement and relocation rather than outright expulsion (my italics,1994:55).

In other areas, the poor were simply kicked off the land or their rents were raised so high that they had to “voluntarily” leave. The idea was to get rid of the problem. The rich needed to make the land productive by the logic of profit and leaving too many people in the Highlands would create the potential for social unrest. It was thought that recruiting Highlanders into the army siphoned off some of the violent men, but some large landlords were even willing to pay their passage to the Americas. Devine continues:
The central feature of the final phase of clearance was the linkage of mass eviction with schemes of assisted emigration. The poor and destitute would be exported to the colonies, even more land released for commercial pastoralism and the growing claims of the people for landlord charity in years effectively eliminated. These policies had already become part of the conventional wisdom by the 1820s as is evidenced by the numerous landlord petitions for emigration assistance dispatched from Herbridean estates to the Colonial Office in that decade (1994:55).

Having created the greater poverty and desperation, the lordship in the Highlands could only offer handouts and then expulsion, which was billed as emigration.

Conclusions: Lairds to Landlords

Chiefly systems of sociopolitical control still characterized the Western Highlands and Islands in the sixteenth century, but this system gradually decomposed. It became a system dominated by exploitative relations between landlords and tenants and by a conflict between the lairds’ interest in raising the price of his land; and the interest of many of the tenants, especially the middling-to-lesser tenants, in the basic needs of subsistence.
The conflicting interests were worked out as chiefs and tenants responded to changing circumstances, each making adjustments. These changes brought about a transformation of the old way of life into a new one. This was a gradual process wherein chiefs slowly changed the rules. As the system decayed, the interests of chiefs and those of the majority of their tenants diverged more and more, leading eventually to a parting.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century lairds and tenants were in greater conflict. Chieftains were caught in a situation where market forces and government pressure led them to don the mantle of landlords. As such they became increasingly concerned with how their estate income could be maximized through the capitalization of all estate resources and by marketing the estate's produce in the outside economy. Novel forces and opportunities brought new responses from the powerful.
But Highland lairds were working in their own poleconomic interests rather than that of their clansmen before the 1750s, but about that time change began to accelerate. These proprietors were developing network linkages with British landed élites. Through this interaction, they acquired the material, intellectual and cultural aspirations of that class. Over time, they were developing social capital beyond the narrower confines of the Highlands or their specific clans. In the eighteenth century, members of this class were notable for their conspicuous consumption. They built castles and great houses, furnished them with ornate furniture and fixtures, traveled widely and visibly and pursued a sumptuous lifestyle. They became involved in competitive display and social climbing. One’s status and family place in the hierarchy became defined in material terms, by the grandeur and extent of one’s holdings. In this atmosphere of social ascension, there was always a drain on the purse, hence the lairds had to find more and better ways to extract labor value for their underlings and exploit the natural properties of their lands.
The communal clan system was replaced by élite maneuvers and moving people to create the crofting system. In this process, people were losing their access to land and the means of subsistence beyond the requirement to work for wages. By the 1840s in most parishes 95% of holdings (crofts) were rented at only a few acres in size. These were, according to the “improving philosophy” laid out in townships. Arable land was divided into smallholdings and these were surrounded by communally held grazing lands. This system did not organically evolve by some “invisible hand” or Providence. It was due to the poleconomic manipulation of élites for the purpose of maximizing their profits:
The most striking feature, however, was that the croft was not designed to provide a full living for the family. Sir John Sinclair, one of the most influential improving propagandists of the day, reckoned that the typical crofter had to be able to obtain at least 200 days of additional work outside his holding in order to avoid chronic destitution and crofts were in fact reduced in size in order to force the crofter and his family into other employments (my emphasis, Devine 1994:47-48).

This is one of the most blatant examples of the fabrication of domination I have found in my research. Usually, poleconomic manipulation is a bit less transparent. Clearly, landed élites were trying to create a reserve army of labor and short-term profits drove the system. The principle behind this “rational” system was that too much land in peasant hands was not good because they could then avoid wage labor. The capitalists needed the labor to mine the slate, extract fish from the sea and collect kelp. Subsistence farming, with a sustainable amount of land, was a distraction from the system capitalists desired. They wanted peasants to be laborers first and farmers only secondarily. The produce of their farm was good in the sense that it allowed the capitalists to pay lower wages, but too much farm production would bite into their domination of the peasantry. The system was designed to keep labor at the barest subsistence level and to percolate profits upward into the hands of the landlords.
This brings up a general principle of my poleconomic analysis of domination. Capitalism is the most awesome system of production on earth. Leaving aside the very important ecological consequences of that production process for a moment, I want to address the real problem of capitalism as I see it. There is nothing wrong with capitalist production (except its environmental damage by over-production, especially of useless commodities). The fault lies in the system of distribution. The Highland example shows that economic change is not always for the better, but it was “better-er” for a few and degrading for many. That is a distribution problem, not one inherent in the capitalist system as a system of production. The lairds could have rationally altered the system to produce great profits and shared them with the people, improving their overall clan base of sustainability. They did not do this. Instead, they became absentee landlords living in their great houses, consuming conspicuously and elevating their families through privileged educational opportunities.
In the Highlands example, élites could invest in other factors of production – land, sheep, cattle and machinery – and do so to the detriment of social relations. In fact, when the Highland commoners were no longer needed, landlords looked for ways to get them off the land, severing past ties.
I want you to contemplate two dates: 1745 and 1848. The first was the defeat of the Jacobite uprising in Scotland and the second was the rebellion of native peoples in Sri Lanka. In both cases, Britain and capitalists reacted identically. Let's look at the Sri Lanka case more closely and you will see what I mean.
Grossholtz calls the fabrications created in Sri Lanka “colony capitalism.” Its success there as a legitimate power structure that justified the exploitation of the land, labor, and resources of the country depended upon the construction of a colonial government. Suppression of the people was initially done militarily, for the first twenty-five years, but that was too costly to sustain over the long haul. The possibilities of rebellion had to be dealt with through construction of a legal system, as defined by the oppressors and, incidentally, paid for by the indigenous Sri Lankans through colonial taxation.
This is a classic case of poleconomic exploitation. Just as the lairds of the Highlands became capitalists and aided in the design of oppression, in Sri Lanka colonial administrators were themselves capitalist go-getters and their interests were the same as those of other financial and commercial groups.
Furthermore, the British carefully nurtured the development of a bourgeois class in Sri Lanka, similar to its creation among the chieftains of the Scottish Highlands, but with one significant difference: racism on the part of the British prevented a full integration of the Sri Lankan bourgeois into the mainstream of capitalist activities in Sri Lanka. Highland lairds did not have such a barrier and once they overcame cultural prejudices, adopting English upper class manners, they were able to integrate into Lowland society.
The words Grossholtz writes about Sri Lanka could be explaining what happened in the Scottish Highlands approximately a hundred years before, with a few minor details. The form was the same. Note:
The heavy-handed repression of the 1848 rebellion, wherein civil servants, planters, and other British residents joined hands against the native population, was specifically related to assuring a ready supply of labor. The widespread starvation and landlessness allowed in the wake of the grain tax were the cost of assuring investors a high rate of return on their investments in land. Conflicts between the governance of the local population and the needs of capital were regularly resolved in favor of capital (1984:130-131).

This oppression, aside from occasional violent suppression of uprisings, was done through construction of a legal framework. That it favored British capitalists is not surprising in that the basis of the British legal system was the protection of property. As with the clearance in the Highlands, land and profits were more important than people, who, in both cases, were defined as savages.
Again, in both cases the British justified their actions in free market terms, with a heavy dose of Enlightenment speechifying and exaggeration. The script in each case broadcast loudly that the measures taken would help the local people in the end. In both the Highlands and Sri Lankan cases it resulted in starvation, violence, death and expulsion of people from their lands. The Highlanders and Sri Lankans were driven to desperation by fanciful ideas, lies and the Power of the Pen (guns were only used when needed).
In the Highland case of creating a kelp industry for displaced families, government policies were deliberately calculated to create dependent cotters who were desperately tied to low-wage kelp production. In Sri Lanka Grossholtz says that the policies of government were intentionally calculated to create an impoverished class that could be mobilized as a labor force at whatever price the employers determined, precisely what was going on with the creation of crofter communities in the Highlands of Scotland.
Finally, Grossholtz asks a question for post-colonial Sri Lanka that we could view more broadly: “Why can't an independent, popularly elected government reorder priorities, redistribute power, and change…basic inequality?” The answer is the same for every society from the Neolithic till now: because of vested interests on the part of those already holding the greatest amount of prestige, power and property. They dominate government of any stripe in the modern world, with a couple of exceptions, and they and their pressure groups resist any change that they see as detrimental to their vested interests.
Grossholtz blames the inertia of government on colonialism: civil government and the rule of law became the means of exploiting the land, labor, and natural resources of Sri Lanka to the poleconomic benefit of the ruling class in Britain. But I have been saying that the problem is broader than that (although she is correct about the deleterious effects of colonial regimes – see my book West Africa, chapter 14). Civil government and the rule of law have been exploitative instruments in the hands of élites ever since a storable, stealable surplus was a lure for aggrandizers. All have moved to create a curtain of office behind which they could operate to increase their prestige, power and property.

SOURCES – CHAPTER 6: HIGHLANDS

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Devine, T. M. 1994. Clanship to crofters’ war: The social transformation of the Scottish Highlands. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Dodgshon, Robert A. 1998. From chiefs to landlords: Social and economic change in the Western Highlands and islands, c. 1493-1820. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Grossholtz, Jean. 1984. Forging capitalist patriarchy: The economic and social transformation of feudal Sri Lanka and its impact on women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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