Clearances and Removals

Abstract

Beginning in the late 18th century and accelerating in the first half of the 19th century thousands of Highlanders were pushed off their lands to make way for commercial sheep farming. Many migrated to North America. About the same time, in the first half of the 19th century, the United States moved toward and then implemented a policy of Indian Removals, forcing thousands of Indian peoples from their homelands in the East to new lands in the West. With particular emphasis on the Sutherland Clearances in the north of Scotland and the Cherokee removal from Georgia, this chapter considers both phenomena as products of economic change affecting the Atlantic world, and notes that some of the Creeks, Cherokees and other Indians who were forced west were sons and daughters of Highlanders who had experienced similar dispossession.