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Scotland's Land

The Politics of Highland ImprovementAnnexation and the Landed Estate in Scotland, 1747-1784

By Juliette Desportes

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Published 31 January 2027

About this book

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

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.

Reviews

An outstanding and much-needed re-assessment of the eighteenth-century Highlands. Juliette Desportes meticulously analyses the experimental and often contradictory nature of the Government’s post-Culloden ‘improvement’ policies, providing important new insights into later Highland history, while challenging many existing preconceptions – not least the Highlander as ‘passive victim’.
The Politics of Highland Improvement provides a comprehensive and superbly-argued analysis of why the Board of Trustees or Commissioners for the Annexed Estates (1755-84) failed in their ambitious plan to transform the Highlands through reform and improvement in the decades after Culloden. The Board’s struggle to adequately survey the confiscated estates, to establish crofting as a solution, to spread the spinning of flax, or to deal with the disputes and petitions that arose from the endless contestations over who had a right to land are all explored in a text that is full of fresh data and insights. Why the Board failed is touched upon throughout but its inability ‘to find a definitive purpose’ and the fact that it preferred to ‘govern by the pen’ from Edinburgh are seen as key factors. For those who want to understand the Highlands in the decades after Culloden, this is a must-read text.
We have for long needed a good book on the Annexed estates. Dr Desportes has provided an outstanding study that takes us far beyond previous works. The perspectives of the people who lived on the estates and the extent to which they resisted the schemes of the managers comes through very clearly. I read this text in Lochaber, in sight of some of the lands discussed, and it profoundly deepened my understanding.
Table of contents

Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and Conventions

Introduction: The Drifts of Progress
1. Beginnings: From Central Governance to Estate Management
2. Mapping Progress: Cartography and the Making of the Improved Highlands?
3. The Origins of Crofting: Smallholdings and the Alternate Geographies of Improvement
4. Spinning Improvement: Manufacture and Experiences of Labour
5. Repertoires of Negotiation: Subversion, Adaptation, and Contestation in Estate Petitions
6. Contested Spaces: Practices and Environments of Resistance
Conclusion: The Highland Landed Estate in the 'First Phase of Clearance'

Appendices
Bibliography
Index

About the author

Juliette Desportes

Juliette Desportes is a postdoctoral researcher based at the University of the Highlands and Islands. Her research focuses on the ways Highland land has been managed, transformed, and contested across the long eighteenth-century, with a particular interest in rural histories and geographies of protest and resistance and the politics of the ‘land question’ in Scotland.

More in this series

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