Social and economic changes included an increase in production of food and raw materials, in turn sustaining the remarkable growth of towns and cities over this period. However, in the folk memory of Scotland the social and cultural costs of the revolution loom much larger: the loss of land for many thousands of families; the rise of individualism and the decline of neighborhood; the death of old rural societies which had formed Scotland's character for many generations. The drama and tragedy of Highland history during this period have attracted many authors, whereas the Lowland experience, that of the majority of Scots, hardly any. This book attempts to redress that balance, and in so doing examines why this extraordinary era, inextricably associated with failure, famine and clearance in Gaeldom, is remembered as one of 'improvements' in the Lowlands, where the folk memory of dispossession, if it ever existed, is long lost in collective amnesia. In so doing, Devine addresses an issue which goes right to the heart of the nation's past.

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: Clearance and Improvement
• 2. Irish and Scottish Development Revisited
• 3. The Great Landlords of Lowland Scotland and Agrarian Change in the Eighteenth Century
• 4. Empire and Land: Glasgow’s Colonial Merchants
• 5. The Highland and Lowland Clearances
• 6. The Making of a Farming Elite? Lowland Scotland, 1750–1850
• 7. Dispossession: Subtenants and Cottars
• 8. Scottish Farm Service in the Agricultural Revolution
• 9. A Conservative People? Scottish Gaeldom in the Age of Improvement
• 10. Highland Migration to Lowland Scotland, 1760–1860
• 11. The Emergence of the New Elite in the Western Highlands and Islands, 1800–1860
• 12. Why the Highlands did not Starve: Ireland and Highland Scotland during the Potato Famine
• Notes
• Index