ABSTRACT
The Roman Empire stopped at the Highland line, which became the north-west frontier beyond which civilisation did not reach. This at least was the view of the Romans and their successors until the eighteenth century. The wild independence and the poverty of the Highlands were subject, in the eighteenth century, to conquest and improvement by forces from the south. The eighteenth-century perception of the Highlands by the rest of Britain was one of ‘suspicion and distaste’: it was a dangerous and primitive periphery which was increasingly a disgrace to the British nation. It is far easier to stress the problems than to make headway with the realities of the pre-clearance Highlands. Poverty among the common people was the standard experience; it was a poverty which became starvation in times of crisis. Highland society in the eighteenth century was in no wise static: it was in the throes of a long-run transition from tribalism to regionalism within the British polity.
