Prof Eric Richards, from Flinders University in Adelaide,
speaks to a Dunedin audience yesterday about academic
differences of opinion about the forced clearance of
tenants from the Scottish Highlands. Photo by Linda
Robertson.
Letters written by Scottish Highlanders forced to leave
their homes during the croft clearances of the 18th and 19th
centuries could provide researchers with the best evidence yet
of the impact of the clearances on families, a visiting
historian says.
Tens of thousands of Highlanders emigrated to other parts of
Scotland and to England, North America, Australia and New
Zealand between the 1760s and the 1880s after Scottish
landlords evicted them from their small holdings so they
could farm on a larger and more economic scale.
Prof Eric Richards, of Flinders University, Adelaide, an
authority on British and Scottish migration, said the letters
from those who left were "the pure gold of archival material"
for historians as they were truly the voice of the people.
Uncovering more letters, some of which might be in New
Zealand archives or still held by descendants, would help
settle the "history wars" between those who denounced the
clearances and those who defended them.
Prof Richards, in Dunedin to give three lectures, told an
audience of more than 200 at the Otago Settlers Museum
yesterday the denouncers used terms like genocide and ethnic
cleansing and even drew parallels with the Jewish Holocaust.
However, the crofter farmers had no legal rights to occupy
their land once they had been asked to leave, and others
viewed the clearances as an unfortunate result of
agricultural development.
"The clearances have polarised opinions . . . and in the
great flood of controversy, academics have been left behind
like shags on a rock."
Prof Richards said the emerging view was the clearances had
to be considered in a wider context and over a longer time
line.
Before and after the clearances, Highlanders caught in the
poverty trap of too many children, falling commodity prices,
uncertain employment prospects and a difficult climate and
terrain for farming were leaving the land, he said.
"The clearances are a severe and dramatic version of the
universal story of rural people leaving the land."
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