ABSTRACT
This chapter is principally concerned with the causes behind Highland social protest after 1914 and it will consider these events in the context of the issues identified in earlier chapters and raised in relation both to social protest generally and to Highland Scotland in particular. Attention will also be given to the impact of the Great War (and war service) and, from this, to the question of whether the period 1914-1918 marks such a significant discontinuity that it renders untenable the notion that the disturbances that occurred after 1914 were part of a longer protest tradition. From a focus on short term economic causation and a discussion of the supposed ideological underpinnings to protest, the argument will be made that it is impossible to isolate any one explanation or, indeed, set of explanations of the decision to protest and that we should accept that the various protestors undertook such actions from a multiplicity of motivations. Nevertheless, it is possible to see much of what was occurring during and after World War One as being based in and drawing inspiration from the crofting landscape – a landscape made meaning full by work tasks. This is a major departure from all other interpretations of Highland protest and it is inextricably linked to the suspicion that such was the impact of the Great War on the nature of these events that we can no longer talk of a tradition of Highland protest.
