Thread by @SymbolStones

Fuadaichean nan Gàidheal. Air an cur às an tìr, fo chumhachd a’ Chrùin!

The Highland Clearances weren’t “internal reform” or accident.

Imposed in annexed Scotland under British rule—enforced by law, army & landlords—a colonial project for imperial profit.

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Here’s how clearance worked & why the British State was at their heart.

Annexed Nation,Imperial Logic

After 1707, Scotland was folded into a“British”state on English terms. Sovereignty lay with Crown-in-Parliament. The so-called Union of equals was a sham—it was annexation.

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The Clearances followed the same Crown-led logic as removals in Ireland, Canada, and Australia — depopulate, restructure, profit, control.

Under the post-1707 legal order, land tenure in Scotland was ultimately held “of the Crown.”

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This meant that when landlords cleared tenants, they did so with the backing of Crown courts and officers — an authority used in other colonies to legitimise dispossession under imperial law.

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“Their houses were not unsafe; their farms were not too small; their land was not unsuitable for cultivation; the people did not leave of their own volition. The laird was not acting in their best interest but in the estates...”

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“... while the claim that no-one was evicted who wished to remain was a downright lie. ”
— Mary Mackenzie, David Taylor. Glen Banchor: A Highland Glen and its People

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Evictions weren’t just landlord disputes. They were upheld in Crown courts and enforced by police, militia, even soldiers. In law and practice, property rights were protected before the people who lived on the land.

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Sheep fed the imperial textile trade. Deer forests served aristocratic leisure. Land became high-value estates — economic re-engineering for the imperial elite, at the expense of local survival.

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Clearance land value soared when people were replaced by sheep — in Sutherland, rents rose 300% in a generation. The state taxed the gains, and revenue drained south rather than being reinvested locally.

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The Education (Scotland) Act 1872 ended non-English schooling. Gaelic received no support; pupils were often punished for speaking it. The law entrenched English-only education and repressed Gaelic for generations.

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To this day in Easter Ross, locals whose ancestors were cleared from Sutherland link two things: the Hilton of Cadboll Pictish stone taken to Edinburgh, and the Leveson-Gower statue looming over Sutherland.

One stolen, one imposed — both reminders of who held power.

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The Clearances dismantled the Highland way of life and culture. Entire communities were swept away as land was turned to profitable sheep farms or deer forests — while those left behind were criminalised for taking game.

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“One afternoon as I was returning from my ramble a strange wailing sound reached my ears at intervals on the breeze from the west. On gaining the top of one of the hills... I could see a long and motley procession winding along the road that lead north from Suishnish...

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“... It halted at the point of the road opposite Kilbride, and there the lamentations became long and loud.

Everyone was in tears, each wished to clasp the hands that had often befriended them, and it seemed as if they could not tear themselves away...

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“When they set forth once more a cry of grief went up to heaven, the long plaintive wail, like a funeral coronach, was resumed, & after the last of the emigrants had disappeared behind the hill,...

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... the sound seemed to re-echo through the whole valley in one prolonged note of desolation. The people were on their way to be shipped to Canada.”
— Sir Archibald Geikie, Scottish Reminiscences (1906)

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Resistance didn’t die. Crofter agitation, land raids, and cultural survival continued into the 20th century. They rioted, withheld rent, resisted eviction, raided land — even refusing forced emigration aboard ships.

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From Sutherland to Skye, people resisted Crown law and landlord power. In Glendale, crofters defied with land raids and rent strikes. At the “Battle of the Braes” (1882), police were driven off — and Royal Marines sent in to enforce order.

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The struggle linked with Ireland. Irish Land League leader & Republican Michael Davitt came to Skye in April 1887, speaking at Portree in solidarity with the crofters. His visit showed the land wars were shared — cross-border resistance to imperial landlordism.

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These flashpoints made headlines. Outcry forced the Napier Commission (1883) to expose abuses, and the Crofters’ Act (1886) gave security of tenure. Not concessions freely given — reforms wrested by struggle.

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Resistance wasn’t only fought on the land. Language, song, and story carried memory of loss and defiance. Even under repression, Gaelic culture endured — a form of everyday, infrapolitical resistance.

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A Crown-led machinery of eviction cleared Irish tenants, removed First Nations in Canada, and displaced Aboriginal communities in Australia. The Highlands were one chapter in a much larger imperial playbook.

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In Canada, the Crown used the Indian Act to enforce removals; in Australia, “terra nullius” justified seizure. In the Highlands, property and eviction law gave landlords the same kind of legal cover — depopulation for profit.

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The Clearances were enabled and enforced by the British State — carried out under Crown law, for imperial profit, in an annexed nation.

Scotland’s fight for land, culture, and control is not over.

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Land reform, cultural revival, and historical truth are inseparable. Until Scotland controls all three, the Clearances remain unfinished.

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Under international law (UNGA 1514, ICCPR Art. 1), the right to self-determination applies to peoples dispossessed of land, resources, and culture under colonial rule. By those definitions, the Clearances — and their legacy — place Scotland within that framework.

/end