Original sentence: As in the Australia example above, there are conflicting views about whether the process of change was genocide: there were social and historical factors at work, including the onset of industrialisation, development of a rational approach to economics, and moves to larger scale agricultiure.Estate  landlords, some absentee, in partnership with ex-clan chiefs, 'encouraged', sometimes forcibly, the population to move off the land, which was then given over to sheep farming.Genocide in the Highland Clearances:.Highlander people were seen as threatening to the established British Government, and thus no public support was given for a way of life which was clearly under threat.In many areas there were small and large scale massacres and violence towards the indigenous people.Other people feel that  what developed does meet the central definition of genocide (see Eric Richard The Highland Clearances 2000 Barlinn Books, for an acknowledgement of both sides of this argument), involving the calculated destruction for economic as well as political reasons of groups leading a way of life which no longer “fitted in”.The Clearances could be argued to be an inevitable collision with an almost feudal way of life led by primitive Gaels who did not for the most part speak English.The Highland Clearances occurred when the Jacobite rebellion failed in the 18th Century, and the traditional Clan system in Scotland subsequently broke up.The people were accommodated in poor crofts or small farms in coastal areas where the farming or fishing could not sustain the communities, or directly put on emigration ships.Together with a failure of the potato crop in the early 19th Century, this policy resulted in starvation, deaths, and a secondary clearance, when Scots either migrated voluntarily or were forcibly evicted, many to emigrate, to join the British army, or to join the growing urban cities in Lowland Scotland