Description:Loch writes that before the Clearances inhabitants on the Sutherland Estate were living in a ‘very wretched and deplorable situation’. His account reveals the motivation behind adopting the clearance policy in Sutherland, stating that the aim of the Clearances was to improve ‘the industry’ of estates in Sutherland in such a way that they would contribute ‘to the wealth of the empire’.
Loch’s account centres on an ideology of industrial improvement. The two pages featured above which describe the ideals behind the policy are annotated with the words ‘Objects of Improvement’. Loch describes the excellent potential for fisheries on the Sutherland coast before writing ‘it seemed as if it had been pointed out by Nature, that the system for this remote district, in order that it might bear its suitable importance in contributing its share to the general stock of the country, was, to convert the mountainous districts into sheep-walks, and to remove the inhabitants to the coast, or to the valleys near the sea’. He outlines the ‘two-fold’ object of the clearances which was firstly ‘to render this mountainous district contributory…to the general wealth and industry of the country’, and secondly ‘to convert the inhabitants of those districts to the habits of regular and continued industry’.
Despite Loch’s assertion that the Clearances were ‘well calculated to raise the importance, and increase the happiness of the individuals themselves’, his account of the ‘Improvements’ on the Sutherland Estate defines improvements to the individual in terms of their functioning to improve the industry and wealth of the Sutherland Estate. His account reveals colonial attitudes in this age of empire, causing the motivation behind the Clearances to appear based on an impersonal ideology of industry influenced by the industrial revolution of the early nineteenth century.