Landscapes of Protest

‘Resistance to ‘improvement’ in the Highlands and Islands, 1750-1820’ is a three-year collaborative project between UHI and the University of Sussex funded by the Leverhulme Trust. It is led by Associate Professor Iain Robertson (UHI) and Professor Carl Griffin (Sussex) and supported by Postdoctoral Research Assistant Juliette Desportes (UHI). 

The project offers the first systematic analysis of the resort to protest in the Highlands and the Islands between the dominant poles of Jacobitism and the Highland Clearances. The ambition is to transform our knowledge of the nature and timing of protest in the Highlands and Islands – and rewrite the story of a much romanticised region by exploring responses to agrarian transformation. 

The temporal frame covers the period 1750 to 1820, which saw Highland tenants faced with an unprecedented attack upon their communal rights and way of life. The period saw a rise in smallholdings and ever-shrinking plots of land, while sheep farming, and kelp harvesting were gradually introduced in the interior and coastlines respectively. The responses of tenants to these radical changes, however, remains under-researched. 

The project challenges the reputation of the Highlands – and the people of the Highlands – as passive in the face of the economic and social dislocations of agricultural ‘improvement’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Histories of resistance in Highlands and Islands – for whatever period – have been almost exclusively written as dramatic, large-scale protests in relation to land occupation, placing an emphasis on both the collective and individual and covert forms of protest. 

Over the course of three years, the project team will visit numerous archives including the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh, Inveraray Castle in Argyll, the Highland Archive Centre in Inverness, and the National Archives in Kew. Sources will include petitions addressed to estate authorities or law enforcements, legal records, estate papers and correspondence, newspapers and much more. 

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