Description:Worship Industry or Starve: The Scottish Highlands are world renowned for their natural beauty, legendary history, and unique culture. However, centuries ago, they were seen as alien, desolate, archaic, and barbaric. Since the time of the ancient Pictish civilization, the Highlands have always been divided from the rest of Britannia by dialect, culture, social structure, and customs. This division peaked during the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and manifested in a devastating chapter in Highland history, the Highland Clearances. The ancient structure of the Highlands experienced a social and economic transformation unparalleled among European societies of the time in its speed, scale and intensity. Not only was Gaelic culture almost completely destroyed, but thousands of native Highlanders were forced to emigrate from their ancestral lands. Many landlords during the Clearances were notoriously inhumane as they accelerated these social changes. They had full power and legal authority over their people and were able to transform their estates however they pleased. However Lord and Lady Stafford of the Sutherland Estate claimed to be different. They relocated their tenants and attempted to integrate them into the new economy, with new housing and a new way of life. In their minds, their improvement policy benefited everyone. The Sutherland Estate management was determined to both give their tenants a more prosperous life and make a large profit. Yet, instead of improvements, there was violence, rebellion, famine, and mass emigration leading to the policy’s failure. The improvement policy of the Sutherland Estate was unsuccessful because the cultural gap between the Highland tenants and the Lowland administrators of the estate was unbridgeable. They loathed one another and the resulting mistrust made cooperation and success nearly impossible.
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