Land Reform in Scotland

Malcolm M. Combe is a Senior Lecturer in law at the University of Strathclyde and non-practising solicitor Jayne Glass is a Researcher in the Natural Resource and Sustainable Development group of the Department of Earth Sciences at Uppsala University in Sweden. She is also an Honorary Lecturer in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh and previously worked at Scotland's Rural College and the University of the Highlands and Islands. Jayne has published widely on topics related to Scotland's land and rural communities, including Lairds, Land and Sustainability (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), Land Reform: History, law and policy (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Rural Poverty Today: experiences of social exclusion in rural Britain (Policy Press, 2023) and Managing Scotland’s Environment (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Annie Tindley is Professor of British and Irish Rural History at Newcastle University and Head of the School of History, Classics & Archaeology. Her work interrogates land issues in the modern period including ownership, management and reform. In 2015 she established and became the first director of the Centre for Scotland's Land Futures, an inter-institutional and interdisciplinary research centre, and is the series editor for Scotland's Land, an interdisciplinary book series published by Edinburgh University Press. She is the author of The Sutherland Estate, 1850-1920 (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), and Lachlan Grant of Ballachulish, 1871-1945 (co-edited with Ewen A. Cameron, Birlinn, 2015).

Land reform has of late loomed large, politically and legislatively, in Scotland. Academic analysis of the origins, nature and impact of reform has, in contrast, been sparse. This book’s authors, not least because of the widely varied perspectives they offer, have gone a long way to making good that deficiency.

• Acknowledgements; List of ContributorsIntroduction Malcolm M. Combe, Jayne Glass and Annie Tindley Part I: HistoryChapter 1: Land, labour and capital: external influences and internal responses in early modern Scotland. Allan MacinnesChapter 2: Agricultural enlightenment, landownership and Scotland’s culture of improvement, 1700-1820. Brian BonnymanChapter 3: The impact of agrarian radicalism on land reform in Scotland and Ireland, 1879-1903. Brian CaseyChapter 4: ‘The usual agencies of civilisation:’ conceptions of landownership and reform in the comparative context in the long nineteenth century. Annie TindleyChapter 5: Still on the agenda? The strange survival of the Scottish land question, 1880 to 1999. Ewen A. Cameron　Part II: Law Chapter 6: History, law and land through the lens of sasine. Andrew R. C. SimpsonChapter 7: Legislating for community land rights. Malcom M. CombeChapter 8: Towards sustainable community ownership: a comparative assessment of Scotland’s new compulsory community right to buy. John A. LovettChapter 9: Property rights and human rights in Scottish land reform. Frankie McCarthyChapter 10: The evolution of sustainable development in Scotland – a case study of community right to buy regimes, 2003 to 2018. Andrea RossChapter 11: Scottish residential tenancies. Douglas BainChapter 12: Crofting law. Eilidh I. M. MacLellanChapter 13: Agricultural tenancy legislation and public policy considerations in Scotland. Hamish LeanPart III: PolicyChapter 14: Planning and rights: are there lessons for town planning we can borrow from land reform? Robert G. ReidChapter 15: Crofting policy and legislation: an undemocratic and illegitimate structure of domination? Iain MacKinnonChapter 16: Does size really matter? Sustainable development outcomes from different scales of land ownership. Jayne Glass, Steven Thomson and Rob Mc MorranChapter 17: Agricultural models in Scotland and Norway – a comparison. Annie McKee, Heidi Vinge, Hilde Bjørkhaug and Reidar AlmåsIndex