Primitive accumulation and the Scottish clann in the Old World and the New

Abstract

In the Highlands of Scotland the clan system was destroyed in two or three generations after the Rising of 1745, but Scottish emigrants reconstituted clan settlements in Cape Breton and southwest Newfoundland that persisted until the first world war. This study compares kinship relations and territorial organization in the Old World and the New, examining their social structures and economic bases from the bottom up, using the concept of primitive accumulation as an analytic tool. Both in Scotland and in British North America the clan was tribal, an extended family, that held territory in common. Settlements were characteristically agglomerated and property was commonly owned by the whole kinship group. In sixteenth-century Scotland, clansmen took a tribal view of their territorial possessions and resisted feudal claims of landlordship. The assumption of ownership rights by clan chiefs in the eighteenth century undermined the clansmen's free enjoyment of the use of their communal lands and resources. Those who emigrated to Cape Breton and Newfoundland sought out their own kin and settled alongside them. Farms passed from one branch of a family to another through succeeding generations but continued to be occupied by members of the same clan and they shared labour and tools when the need arose. In the New World, the clan system was preserved by marriage, mutual aid and communal tenure not for sentimental reasons but for survival and efficiency in a harsh pioneering environment.