The Politics of Highland Improvement: Annexation and the Landed Estate in Scotland 1747 - 1784

This book studies attempts to ‘improve’ land and livelihoods in the post-Culloden Highlands. Its starting point is the Jacobite rising of 1745, which led to the forfeiture and then annexation of thirteen Highland landed estates between 1747 and 1784 by the Hanoverian state. The period of annexation would enshrine many of the features that came to characterise the Highlands over the next hundred years, from crofting tenure to increasingly privatised estate landscapes.

Replacing the Highland tenantry at the centre of the processes of land improvement and uncovering fresh perspectives on themes such as mapping, crofting, gendered labour and rural resistance, the book explores the ways the Highland landed estate and, by extension, the Highland region, was used as a laboratory to experiment with ideas about social, cultural and economic improvement.

It also traces how these ideas were then shaped, negotiated and contested by estate residents.
Explores land, its ownership and management in eighteenth-century Scotland

Provides a reinterpretation of the emergence of the ‘modern’ landed estate after Culloden, including the introduction of crofting tenure
Revisits the chronology and geographies of agrarian ‘improvement’ in the Scottish Highlands before the main phase of Clearance, 1750-1780
Explores the role and significance of the Annexed Estates (1752-1784) and re-assesses the relationship between the British state and the Scottish Highlands in this period
Tells the history of land improvement ‘from below’, focusing on the role and attitudes of estate residents, including the resort to protest
Brings together an array of sources from estate archives, maps, and Gaelic poetry