Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 1 (2019), p. 141

In August 2013, guests and visitors from around the world congregated in the Strath of Kildonan, in the eastern part of the Scottish county of Sutherlandshire, to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of the Strath’s notorious clearances. The two-week ‘Translocation Festival’, overseen by Helmsdale’s Timespan Museum and Arts Centre, did more than reflect on a well-known narrative – the idea of a traditional agrarian society being destroyed by the inevitable creep of capitalism – it ensured that voices were given to those who had been marginalized in the past. Jacquie Aitken, of Timespan, stressed a fact that can often be buried beneath statistics and official accounts: the evicted and dispossessed ‘were “real” people with the same thoughts and feelings as us’. This human focus, indeed, has become more prevalent in historical narratives – in recent months I have heard exactly the same argument made in the context of the Great Irish Famine (for example in identifying and attributing personalities to the ‘Strokestown 1490’, a previously amorphous group of evictees from the west of Ireland), as well as Finland’s ‘Great Hunger Years’ (the inauguration address for a memorial in Ruovesi, in the summer of 2018, stressed that it was all very well to recall that ‘19 per cent of the parish died in 1868’, but that each individual who perished was an individual with hopes, dreams, families and friends). James Hunter’s latest contribution to the historiography of the Gàidhealtachd and its Diaspora continues what has been, for him, a career-long crusade to amplify the subaltern voices of Scottish history.

For those acquainted with Hunter’s previous works, Set adrift upon the world adopts a familiar tone – combative but optimistic, and determined to highlight the power structures which facilitated the mass social engineering and evictions of the Highland Clearances. The book’s structure is largely chronological, although it leaps back into the present from time to time, in order to give context to characters, refer to the descendants of those who were cleared, to make explicit points about the cyclical nature of history, or to underline the persistence of the abuse of hegemonic power (allusions to Orwell and Stalin crop up quite regularly). Generations of writers who have, in Hunter’s eyes, connived to normalize the Clearances and their consequences within a narrative of inevitable economic rationalization and progress, are treated with suspicion, if not outright disdain.

Hunter opens the book (p. 1) with a dramatis personae (‘actors in the Clearance drama’) and notes that ‘what follows is a story’. As a result, it is tempting to bracket Set adrift upon the world alongside earlier polemical works about Sutherland – such as Ian Grimble’s The trial of Patrick Sellar (1962), or John Prebble’s The Highland Clearances (1963) or, indeed, the agitprop of John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the stag, and the black, black oil (1973). What sets Hunter apart, however, is the sheer depth and breadth of his archival knowledge (in Gaelic and English), his extensive fieldwork, and his journalistic ability to weave complex stands into a compelling and readable narrative.

A key theme of the book is that the people themselves, despite the trying circumstances, always retained some sort of agency: early protests against the estate reorganization, therefore, are presented as rooted in tradition (pp. 94–5); the decision made by many cleared tenants to emigrate to Canada rather than remain in small coastal crofts, is presented as a conscious choice which sought to deprive the estate of labour (p. 129); attempts were made to bargain with the British crown (p. 115) – by promising a steady flow of soldiers for the empire in return for a guarantee against eviction; and during the Crofters War period of the 1880s (pp. 348–40), the actions of Patrick Sellar, James Loch, and the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland were used to stir the people of Sutherlandshire to protest or (especially after 1885) political action. Another theme – that of a pre-Clearance ‘Golden Age’, is a trope dismissed relatively easily as romanticism in literary works such as Butcher’s broom (Neil Gunn, 1934), And the cock crew (Fionn MacColla, 1945), The desperate journey (Kathleen Fidler, 1964), or Consider the lilies (Iain Crichton Smith, 1968). Hunter is aware of this trap, however, and throughout Set adrift upon the world he presents the common perception of Sutherlandshire’s ‘wilderness’, or ‘unimprovability’, only to counter that any wilderness is entirely man-made, and that pre-Clearance society was not only viable, but thriving (inter alia, pp. 5, 69, 90). This contention is reinforced in the conclusion (p. 472), where a future is imagined in which houses have been rebuilt and the straths resettled, and the Clearances are seen as ‘an indefensible departure from the way things were, and the way they should have been’.

In setting up the ‘Rebellion at Kildonan’ (p. 63), Hunter quotes the renowned artist Alison Watt on Henry Raeburn’s portrait of Major William Clunes (included in the book’s plates section along with twenty-six other images). Clunes’ new sheep farm at Torrish was one of the major triggers for the Kildonan Rising of 1813, and his portrait is featured prominently in the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. ‘Few artists’, argues Watt, ‘have the skill or chutzpah’ to create such a striking image. It is also fair to argue, after reading Set adrift upon the world, that few historians other than James Hunter possess the skill or chutzpah to produce such a coherent, convincing, and moving book about the Sutherland Clearances.