ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to identify the nature and geography of the demographic, socioeconomic and cultural-ideological processes which lay behind changes in agrarian practices and land-holding and to which rural social protest in Highland Scotland was a reaction. Much of what follows will be a re-visiting of well-worn ground. No apologies are offered for this as, as discussed in the Introduction, this volume is firmly based on the anticipation of two significantly different readerships, one of which will almost certainly be unfamiliar, to a greater of lesser extent, with the discussion essayed here. Indeed, one of the enduring problems with discussions of Highland protest is that full understanding requires engagement with two distinct sets of literature and this has seldom been attempted or fully articulated. This and the following chapter thus attempts to carry off this difficult balancing act in the full and frank knowledge of the consequences of falling off. Thus, setting off in
trepidation of producing what MacAskill has called ‘trite history’,4 the aim is not to engage in a detailed historiographical digression from the main focus of this book but to provide a frame, when viewed in conjunction with the following chapter, for the boundaries of our understanding of the events of protest which flowed from the momentous changes captured in this chapter. Frames need not be substantial and that offered here, whilst not insubstantial, does have something of the sketch about it in the belief that this meets the contextualising objective. In addition it is important to recognise that the reaction from the land working population was not necessarily synchronous with the socio-economic and cultural-ideological changes it opposed. Certainly the more successful protests of the 1920s occurred some time after these changes were complete, a delay that was the product of the slow emergence of crofting class consciousness and self-confidence. It thus becomes ever more important to set these events within their wider context – both the historical narrative and the historiography.
