LAIRDS AND LUXURY

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Introduction: Transforming the Highlands

This book is about a group of people who were responsible for much of the change that took place in the Highlands of Scotland during the ‘long’ eighteenth century from about 1680 to 1830. It is focused on a series of landowning families and their evolving relationships through five generations with luxury consumption.
   This may seem a like frivolous subject. The eighteenth century was, after all, an age that witnessed many great events of national and international importance in the Highlands, from the Jacobite uprisings to clearance and mass migration. Political oppression, economic collapse, militarisation and population loss are some of the weightier themes of Highland history. Yet many historians, in pointing to the transformative and ultimately disastrous changes that took place in the Highlands, have blamed much of the ills of the age on the luxury and financial fecklessness of lairds. Here is a typical example, taken from what is probably the most widely read history of Scotland of the past thirty years.
   Highland landowners were often greedy and short-sighted . . . They seem to have creamed off a larger proportion of the total profits [of their estates] into their own hands than did the Lowland lairds . . . Clanranald never ploughed anything back into the Uists . . . He was content to spend the kelp money on conspicuous consumption and adding to and servicing the heavy debt charge on his estate.
   The theme is echoed in a recent influential survey of modern Scotland.
   Among the aristocracy and gentry the eighteenth century was an era of conspicuous consumption . . . the atmosphere in elite circles was one of competitive display . . . this was the world now inhabited by the highland landowners, one which was a constant drain on the purse and in which they could not well easily survive on the paltry returns of traditional agriculture.
   It appears again in a social history of the period, which draws attention to some of the sources of profit from late eighteenth-century Highland estates and concludes that much of what was earned by landowners was ‘dissipated on conspicuous or non-productive consumption’, resulting in spectacular bankruptcies by the early nineteenth century.
   It is not surprising that historians should take such a view, for there were many bankrupt Highland estates in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and many contemporary observers were similar impressed by the scale of modern consumerism. A Highland laird, William Macintosh of Borlum, writing in the early eighteenth century, highlighted what he called an ‘epidemic’ of spending, ‘in very little houses, and as little estates to supply them’. In 1773, when Johnson and Boswell took their famous tour of the Highlands in search of the ancient life of the clans, they were disappointed to find that southern ‘politeness’ and the metropolitan ‘world of goods’ had greatly eroded what they had come to observe, and that those elite Highlanders who still lived a life embedded in the social practices and material culture of the past yearned for the comforts and conveniences of ‘modern refinement’. Indeed, Boswell reveals evidence of modern consumerism on even the remotest islands, and though this did not reach the lives of the very poor, it certainly shaped the experience and expectations of the middling sort of people and the gentry.
   Gaelic poets, representing the voice of the ordinary people, charted the new interest in commercial wealth and its trappings with a growing sense of dismay. Here is Rob Donn Macintyre, writing mid-century on the rising generation of Sutherland gentlemen.

They are within the letter of the law
And they are sharp over debts
And they are punctilious in paying
What they owe one another,
But for the rest, it will be stowed away
Though it’s hard to hoard against hospitality;
And their purses and their eyes
Are equally shut to the man in need.

   Rob Donn also composed a poem to his patron, Hugh Mackay of Bighouse, when the latter purchased a new suit of clothing and wore it for the first time. The tone was not complementary. ‘There is not a button nor a button-hole in it / That hasn’t taken money off a poor man.’
   By the early nineteenth century, the popular condemnation of Highland elites was often couched in the moral language of the Presbyterian evangelical, as in the following verse by Mary MacPherson of Badenoch, celebrated Gaelic poet and pious widow of a local schoolmaster.

Dangerous is the effect upon mankind
Of everyone determinedly seeking wealth,
Travelling near and far to find it
With war and strife to bring it home.
Many a person spends his labour
Whose wealth have given him no pleasure.
Cursed by the one who robs the needy
In order to enrich himself.

And because we all must travel on
To the holy ground from which we rose at first,
Into the grave in which we’ll speak not of wealth
And in which we’ll have no need to spend,
Vain is each fashion and fine clothing,
Thin is the shirt in which this body goes.

   Historians of recent times have continued to use a moralising tone when describing the consumption habits of the eighteenth-century Highland gentry. Foolishness and venality are the usual accusations. But such reasoning offers no real insights into why so many lairds and their families behaved in this way, for surely not all were fools. We know little about the underlying reasons for the ‘epidemic’ of spending among those with ‘very little houses’ and ‘very little estates’ to supply them. And we know less about who was doing the spending and what it was that they actually bought. This book is intended to offer some answers. Yet to find the roots of eighteenth-century conspicuous consumption, which was a distinct form of social behaviour vested in longstanding cultural beliefs and complex relational practices, we have to start in the century before, when agencies outside the Highlands sought to encourage change.