Ireland, radicalism and the Scottish Highlands, c.1870-1912

Abstract

It is ironic that the most revolutionary socio-economic question in Victorian Britain and Ireland was not connected to the plight of factory workers in the new industrial towns—as Marx and Engels had prophesied—but to the problems of agricultural labour in the ‘peripheral’ areas of the country. If the ‘land wars’ in the United Kingdom were not straightforward examples of ‘class’ struggle, they were as close to it as any social conflict could possibly be. Furthermore, they were characterised to a considerable extent by what the Marxists always hoped to see happening in industrial relations (but never really did), namely, an international solidarity overcoming religious and political divides, and bringing about cross-fertilisation of ideas and tactics. Newby's book is certainly not inspired by Marxism, but constitutes a scholarly, systematic analysis of one outstanding example of such a process. The Scottish Highlands were often regarded both as the playground of the British nobility and the human reservoir for the Imperial armed forces. However, between 1881 and 1886 they became a hotbed of social unrest and radical activism. During those few years it was feared that the crofters would emulate the Irish tenant farmers and set up their own ‘Parnellite’ Parliamentary party. Quite apart from governmental politics, the situation on the ground was quasi-revolutionary: the law was challenged and defied, the constabulary overpowered by angry crowds, the army and the Royal Marines were deployed in the glens, and gunboats patrolled the Lochs. Such was the shock in political circles that, by 1886, Irish-style legislation was rushed through Parliament by the third Gladstone government, seeking to secure ‘fair rents’, ‘fixity of tenure’ and ‘free’ sale to Highlanders. Later, both Joseph Chamberlain's Unionists and the Liberals under Asquith and Lloyd George continued to worry about Northern Scotland, in a way no British government had done since the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. Aspects of these events have been examined by a number of historians, including Tom Devine, Euan Cameron, and, most recently, Allan W. MacColl in his fundamental study on the Highland Churches. Newby, however, focuses on a dimension which had previously been neglected—namely, the Irish nexus. As already indicated, this was regarded at the time as a particularly alarming feature of the crofters’ movement. It was reported that Highland fishermen had come back to Skye from Kinsale ‘contaminated’ by Michael Davitt's ideas, and that Irish ‘emissaries’ had followed them, evangelising the peasants with ‘socialistic’ publications. Moreover, it was the police who more than anybody else were concerned about such a deepening Irish connection, especially when Irish-style threatening notes began to appear throughout Glendale, warning crofters against paying their rents in defiance of the Highland Land League's subversive strategy (p. 62). Parnell, Davitt and the American land reformer, Henry George, were very popular in the region, and their visits to Scotland occasioned scenes of great excitement. George's ideas were particularly effective, because couched in a Biblical language which spoke to the heart, as well as to the mind, of the pious Gaelic Presbyterian—to H.M. Hyndman's chagrin: by contrast, he noted that Marx's more ‘rigorous’ analysis made little progress in Britain.