Relocate or emigrate

There is a degree of irony in the opening chapter of T.M. Devine’s history, lambasting popular previous depictions of the Clearances and citing ludicrous comparisons to Nazi genocide and the misty-eyed melancholy of John Prebble. Though it does not mention such iconography as Thomas Faed’s painting ‘Last of the Clans’, used for the paperback of Prebble’s book, or Erskine Nicol’s ‘An Ejected Family’ in all its schmaltzy Victorian glory, such depictions are clearly the target. Yet the book itself is called The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed and not, which would actually be more accurate, ‘Patterns of Land Ownership, Agricultural Change as well as Internal and External Migrations in Scotland, 1600–1900’. Not such a grabby title.

Devine, as a historian, is meticulous if not always enthralling. There is an air of the Harold Wilson era about this book. With white-hot research, lots of carefully calibrated tables and perhaps the occasional use of a slide rule and logarithm book, the Truth can be established.