Politics of Highland Improvement

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.

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’.

• IllustrationsAcknowledgementsAbbreviations and ConventionsIntroduction: The Drifts of Progress1. Beginnings: From Central Governance to Estate Management2. Mapping Progress: Cartography and the Making of the Improved Highlands?3. The Origins of Crofting: Smallholdings and the Alternate Geographies of Improvement4. Spinning Improvement: Manufacture and Experiences of Labour5. Repertoires of Negotiation: Subversion, Adaptation, and Contestation in Estate Petitions6. Contested Spaces: Practices and Environments of ResistanceConclusion: The Highland Landed Estate in the 'First Phase of Clearance'Appendices Bibliography Index