page_title: Economic history of Scotland
section_title: Rural life
hierarchical_section_title: Economic history of Scotland / 19th century / Rural life
caption_attribution_description: English: Ruined cottage in the deserted village of Lawers below Ben Lawers on the north side of Loch Tay, Perthshire. The area was affected by the so-called "Breadalbane Clearances" of the 1840s.
context_page_description: The economic history of Scotland charts economic development in the history of Scotland from earliest times, through seven centuries as an independent state and following Union with England, three centuries as a country of the United Kingdom. Before 1700 Scotland was a poor rural area, with few natural resources or advantages, remotely located on the periphery of the European world. Outward migration to England, and to North America, was heavy from 1700 well into the 20th century. After 1800 the economy took off, and industrialized rapidly, with textile, coal, iron, railroads, and most famously shipbuilding and banking. Glasgow was the centre of the Scottish economy. After the end of the First World War in 1918, Scotland went into a steady economic decline, shedding thousands of high-paying engineering jobs, and having very high rates of unemployment especially in the 1930s. Wartime demand in the Second World War temporarily reversed the decline, but conditions were difficult in the 1950s and 1960s. The discovery of North Sea oil in the 1970s brought new wealth, and a new cycle of boom and bust, even as the old industrial base had decayed.
context_section_description: A handful of powerful families, typified by the dukes of Argyll, Atholl, Buccleuch, and Sutherland, owned an enormous quantity of land and, until 1885, had great influence on political affairs.  The concentration of land ownership is illustrated by, in 1878, 68 persons owning nearly half of Scotland and 580 people owning over three quarters.
  Agriculture in the Lowlands was steadily upgraded after 1700, and standards remained high. However, after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, when Britain adopted a free trade policy, grain imports from America undermined the profitability of crop production.  The result was a continuous exodus from the land—to the cities, or further afield to England, Canada, America or Australia.
  The traditional landed interests held their own politically in the face of the rapidly growing urban middle classes, for the electoral reforms of mid-century were less far-reaching in Scotland than in England. The landed interests managed to ensure that the political weight of numbers was skewed disproportionately in their favour.
  The Highlands meanwhile were very poor and traditional, with few connections to the uplift of the Scottish Enlightenment and little role in the Industrial Revolution. The 100 or so wealthiest landlords needed cash to maintain their position in London society, and had less need of soldiers now that warfare had abated.  Therefore, they turned to money rents, displaced farmers to raise sheep, and downplayed the traditional patriarchal relationship that had historically sustained the clans.  A new group appeared, the crofters, emerging for the first time in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They were poor families living on "crofts"  or very small rented farms used to raise potatoes, with kelping, fishing, and spinning of linen, and military service, as important sources of revenue.
  The era of the Napoleonic wars, 1790–1815, brought prosperity, optimism, and economic growth to the Highlands. The economy grew thanks to wages paid by kelping industry (where men burned kelp for the ashes), fisheries, and weaving, as well as large-scale infrastructure spending such as the Caledonian Canal project. On the East Coast, farmlands were improved, and high prices for cattle brought money to the community. Service in the Army was also attractive to young men from Highlands, who sent pay home and retired there with their army pensions. The prosperity ended after 1815, and long-run negative factors began to undermine the economic position of the poor tenant farmers or "crofters," as they were called. The adoption by the landowners of a market orientation in the century after 1750 dissolved the traditional social and economic structure of the north-west Highlands and Hebrides Islands, causing great disruption for the crofters.  The Highland Clearances and the end of the township system followed changes in land ownership and tenancy and the replacement of cattle by sheep.
caption: One of a cluster of deserted and ruinous cottages on the north side of Loch Tay, Perthshire. The area was affected by the so-called "Breadalbane Clearances" of the 1840s.
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