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Scotland’s Global Impact Conference: Speaker Articles

12th October 2009

By: Ewen A. Cameron
Title: The Problem of Scottish Emigration

In September 2000 the Scottish Parliament passed a motion expressing its ‘deepest regrets for the occurrence of the Highland clearances and extends its hand in friendship to the descendants of the cleared people who reside outwith our shores’. Leaving aside the limited value of expressions of regret for historical events, this motion exemplifies a problem in our view of an important aspect of our history.

There is here a conflation of two distinct processes: the highland clearances and the long history of emigration from Scotland. The history of emigration is only part of the story of the clearances and the history of the clearances is only a very small part of the much larger history of Scottish emigration. The emphasis on the clearances has the effect of eliding a series of important wider points about Scottish emigration. Although it may have been the case that a majority of the emigrants of the eighteenth century were from the Highlands this was certainly not the case in the much larger movement of people in the years from 1815 to 1929. In this period around 45 million people left Europe seeking a home in the New World; remarkably, around 2 million were from Scotland. Only a very small minority, however, were from the Highlands; the majority were skilled workers from the industrial areas of lowland Scotland. Why, then, has highland emigration loomed so large in the Scottish memory of emigration?

Part of the answer relates to cultural comment on emigration. From the nineteenth century paintings of Thomas Faed and William McTaggart to the twentieth century novels of Neil Gunn there has been a lament that the clearances, and the emigration which was associated with the later part of that long and complex process, were central to the destruction of Scotland’s Celtic past. McTaggart’s paintings are perhaps the most subtle and evocative of these cultural expressions of regret. A second point is a political one. Although it was not until the early part of the twentieth century that the government began to think of what should be its ‘policy’ on emigration in a general sense, there was a longer history of interest in emigration from the highlands. In the early nineteenth century the emphasis was on the limitation of emigration and there were attempts to do this under the cloak of progressive regulation of the passenger trade. This soon gave way to deregulation of the trade in an effort to promote emigration. The enthusiasm for emigration reached a peak in the 1840s and 1850s and nearly every one of the nineteenth century investigations into the condition of the highlands – from that of Sir John MacNeill in 1851 to the Napier Commission of 1883–4 – recommended that emigration be part of supposed ‘solutions’ to the highland ‘problem’.

This emphasis, even obsession, with emigration has left its mark and contributed to the conflation of clearance and emigration evident in the Scottish Parliament motion of 2000.  This conception of emigration has cast a negative light over the movement of people from Scotland. Critics of the effect of emigration on Scotland have used such vocabulary as ‘haemorrhage’ to describe the process. At a number of different points in the twentieth century there has been deep concern about the extent of Scottish emigration. In the 1920s, when net emigration of 390,000 people cancelled out the natural increase of the population between the censuses of 1921 and 1931, there was a feeling, sometimes expressed in common with a visceral anti-Irishness, that emigration had the effect of reducing the quality of the national stock. This was a period, however, in which the government sought to promote emigration to the colonies, especially Australia and Canada, and the colonial enthusiasm for emigrants from Britain continued until at least the 1960s. During the late 1960s there was a new attitude to emigration in many quarters. There was a perception that increased levels of outward movement was contributing to skill shortages and had the potential to compromise economic growth. One Scottish Office civil servant, tongue in cheek, suggested that there should be a tax on emigration in order to control its extent!

Finally, it is worth thinking a little about the contradiction between the frequent celebrations of the global Scottish clan and the idealisation of the Scottish role in ‘building up the empire’ and the denigration of the process which fuelled that achievement. The Year of Scottish Homecoming has many objectives but it would be helpful if those who have come ‘home’ and those who have worked so hard to facilitate this return reflected more widely on the role of Scottish emigration in Scottish history.

Inverness born Ewen A Cameron will address The Problem of Scottish Emigration at the Scotland’s Global Impact Conference, Eden Court Theatre, Inverness from 22 to 24 October. This Conference will reveal much about the people of Scotland, exploring why they left their country over many centuries and unravelling the huge impact this small nation has made on the rest of our planet. Opened by First Minister Alex Salmond and chaired by the BBC’s Lesley Riddoch, the Scotland’s Global Impact features a number of controversial speakers, including Eric Richards, author of Patrick Sellar and the Highland Clearances. For more information or tickets go to http://www.scotlandsglobalimpact.com commemoration, scheduled for 22-24 October at the Eden Court Theatre in Inverness.

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