Setting the Heather on Fire: The Land Question in Scotland, 1850–1914

The historian of the Scottish land question has to tread a careful line between emphasising distinctiveness and recognising the generic elements of the problem. Indeed, a plausible case could be made for undermining the ‘Scottish’ land question on the grounds of local diversity. The troubled history of the Highlands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — the clearances, the famine of the 1840s, the ‘Crofters War’ of the 1880s — is very different from the story of high-farming efficiency which is the dominant narrative of the Lowlands over the same period. Even this binary division between Highlands and Lowlands can be broken down: the fertile conditions prevalent in the ‘Black Isle’, Easter Ross and Caithness had little in common with those of the west and the Hebrides where extremely harsh conditions dominated. In the Lowlands, the best farming areas of East Lothian and Fife were a world away from conditions in Aberdeenshire or the upland areas of southern Scotland. Although many of the same historical processes affected the Lowlands as the Highlands, it was the vivid nature of the land question in the latter area which captured the public imagination and the political agenda in Scotland. The domination of Scottish politics by the Liberal party also contributed to the Scottish land question. From 1832 to 1918, there was only one general election, in 1900, at which the Liberals did not win a majority of Scottish seats, and they used the land question as a key component of their appeal north of the border.