Talk:George Leveson-Gower, 1st Duke of Sutherland

Untitled
According to Duke of Sutherland and john Prebble he married Elizabeth Gordon, 19th Countess of Sutherland. Please clarify. ..dave souza, talk 17:06, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Elizabeth's great-great-grandfather had changed the family's name to Sutherland in 1690. Craigy (talk) 19:04, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

The Clearances
I've removed a phrase which described the Highland Clearances as "an early form of ethnic cleansing". Apart from being emotive language and therefore unencyclopaedic, I would have thought that ethnic cleansing would imply the removal of people of one sort of ethnicity but not another. The clearances just removed all people without discrimination, so "cleansing" (with no qualifying adjective) would be a more accurate term. Opera hat (talk) 12:08, 7 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Not at all. Those removed from land were almost invariably Gaelic-speaking and Catholic, whilst those that replaced them (the much smaller number of sheep farmers) were generally English speaking and Protestant. I am not sure what is unencyclopaedic about calling a spade a spade. Ben MacDuiTalk /  Walk  16:14, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

Confusing Edit Summary - Change of Political Party
I belatedly discover I left behind a confusing edit summary (on 26 May 2012) describing the Duke's political party defection as being from "Whig to Tory party". For the record the reverse was the case, as written by me in the article, and cited to The Complete Peerage. Apologies.Cloptonson (talk) 18:57, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Should the Duke's nationality be listed as Scottish?
The Duke descended from a long line of English aristocrats. His (controversial) involvement with Scotland was caused by the fact that his wife was Scottish and brought him an immense dowry of Scottish lands. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tatiana.larina (talk • contribs) 20:27, 20 June 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree. His Englishness is also affirmed in the inscription on the Lilleshall Monument which describes him as "a gentleman of England" - his tenants clearly did not think him a Scot despite his ultimate peerage title. Before the creation of his Dukedom most of his adult life had been spent as Earl Gower and then Marquess of Stafford, titles the same tenants would have previously been accustomed to knowing him as.Cloptonson (talk) 14:16, 21 December 2022 (UTC)


 * User:Cloptonson, take a look at the article, the Duke's nationality was corrected a number of years ago. Anyway, a title does not signify nationality: consider Harold Alexander, 1st Earl Alexander of Tunis, who was certainly not Tunisian. The initial comment, above, is somewhat misleading as the Sutherland Estate at the time of the marriage of Leveson-Gower to the Countess of Sutherland was pretty much broke, a common situation with Highland estates. It is Leveson-Gower who brought so much to the marriage, in the form of his future inheritance of the Bridgewater estate. Ultimately this made him the richest man in Britain. A huge amount of this wealth was spent on Sutherland. Sadly (for all parties) much of this was wasted on ineffective projects. See the talk page section that follows this one. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 17:12, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

Problem text
His new wife did not own most of Sutherland. After making some purchases of estates that came on the market, by 1816, based on the valued rent in the county, the Sutherland Estate was 63% of the whole. At the time of her marriage to Leveson-Gower, it was probably more like 50%. This is not "most".

The Sutherland Estate was not a financial asset. It had some significant debts at the time of their marriage, and further debts were incurred to finance the couple's time in Paris - much of this was raised by an archaic form of mortgage known as a wadset. Once Leveson-Gore had inherited his huge wealth, a large part of that was invested in the Sutherland Estate - but the return on capital was low. To quote Eric Richards: "In retrospect the Sutherland estate seems like a sump into which some of the richest profits of English industrialisation were lost in Highland bogs. Eventually the loss to the nation at large was appalling and rarely accounted in the balance sheet of the clearances."

Unreliable source?
This passage gets the order of events wrong. Sellar successfully bid for the sheep farm in question on 15th December 1813. The clearance events that gave rise to his trial centred around evictions on 13th July 1814. The trial took place on 23rd-24th April 1816.

Checking the reference given in the article (J D Mackie's A History of Scotland ), it also gets this wrong. Given that this book was written in 1970, and that a lot of basic research has been carried out on the Sutherland Clearances since that date, it seems reasonable to regard this as an unreliable source. Is there a better source for the content about discussion in the House of Commons? ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 23:35, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

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Ethnic cleansing - a widespread, mainstream view
My Google search records 492,000 results for "Highland Clearances ethnic cleansing", compared to 814,000 for "Highland Clearances" alone. I think it is undeniable that it's a widely held view on the subject. Wikipedia defines ethnic cleansing as "the systematic forced removal of ethnic or racial groups from a given territory" and notes that this can occur through forced population transfer. Catrìona (talk) 08:33, 20 September 2018 (UTC)


 * But this article is about a person in history. Therefore one could look to WP:HISTRS for guidance. I am not aware of any of the historians writing on this subject mentioning ethnic cleansing in any terms other than commenting on the "non-historian" view of the subject - i.e. the opinion in popular culture.
 * Furthermore, I think we all know that the internet has a substantial imbalance on fringe minority ideas - if you google things like crop circles or ley lines you will find ample material to suggest that these are "real" (for want of a better description of what their advocates think about them). The fact that a lot of people are discussing something does not make it true. Look at how many people remain supporters on the internet of Andrew Wakefield, despite his flawed opinions damaging and killing so many innocent people.
 * More importantly, the strong implication behind ethnic cleansing is that some or many people are deliberately killed or maimed as part of a policy of removing an ethnic group. Consider any reasonable person who had any knowledge of both the Highland clearances and, say, the Rwandan Genocide (not specifically described as ethnic cleansing on Wikipedia, but clearly called that in contemporary news reports and in the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Ethnic Cleansing), or the ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia (the conflict that saw this phrase enter the English language - when the world saw concentration camps, organised killing of detainees and high-rise snipers killing civilians who were searching for food) - they would not say that they were comparable. I think typifying the Highland clearances as ethnic cleansing would be deeply offensive to anyone who had experienced any of these clearcut examples of this horrific practice. There is a massive difference between being evicted in a legal (if heartless) process and having to flee for your life when friends and neighbours who are less lucky have their arms severed with a machete (see Rwanda Genocide). Even the expulsion of the remaining Germans from East Prussia in 1945 (after the majority of the ethnic Germans had been evacuated in the face of the Soviet advance) could be considered as the continuation of one purpose of the war between Germany and the USSR - and Stalin's Russia was known for killing large numbers of people.
 * Next one should consider motivation. The first phase of the clearances was not generally typified by outright expulsion. The second phase of the clearances involved an ambition to get rid of surplus population - but largely out of desperation in trying to find a way of dealing with an excess of people for whom there was no work or means of finding a living - these were essentially people in the overcrowded former kelp processing crofting communities who were now affected by the potato famine. So not only were they redundant (in the employment sense) but the very basis of their survival (the productive potato) was no longer there. Whilst one can detect a thread of racial discrimination through the processes of both phases, the clear message from historians is that the first phase was particularly driven by economic causes: the wish for higher income and the second phase was driven by the economic imperative of a redundant workforce coupled with famine. If this were ethnic cleansing, the simplest course of action for the alleged ethnic cleansers would have been to let these populations starve to death.
 * As you well know, the population numbers in areas subject to clearance tended to increase - if the Highland clearances were an attempt to remove the indigenous population, it was a dramatic failure. The vast majority of Highlanders who left were either, over the whole period of the clearances, but particularly in the early phases, the better off farmers who could see a better life in the New World or the people who left after the end of the clearances. This is explained in, among other sources, Eric Richards book: "The Highland Clearances..." and in Tom Devine's "To the Ends of the Earth" and (I believe) in "Clanship to Crofters' War".
 * Then if you look through the extensive archive of the Highland clearances talk page, I believe you will find where this has been discussed before and the conclusion was that the Highland clearances is not an example of ethnic cleansing. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 23:17, 20 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Apart from the above, what distinguishes it from genuine ethnic cleansing, as I expect many of those ghits say, is that the Highlands only contained a single ethnic group, and there was no intention to replace that group with another, or remove one ethnic group to improve the situation of another. The "ethnic" dimension is completely missing. Johnbod (talk) 00:13, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
 * All I am saying is that the clearances are often percieved as ethnic cleansing, perhaps because they were the closest thing that happened in Scotland in the last few hundred years. Ethnic cleansing (which is not the same as genocide) is a term with no widely accepted definition, and you can easily find mainstream newspapers, books, and websites endorsing or acknowledging the view of the clearances as ethnic cleansing which is not true of most conspiracy theories or true fringe views. (As an aside, those who promulgate the view that the clearances were ethnic cleansing don't seem to be arguing that it was comparable with the examples that you cite. But the well known Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean made a habit of all sorts of dubious comparisons, such as between the Easter Rising and Jewish resistance during the Holocaust; atomic bombs and the Highland Clearances etc., and got nothing but praise for it). Obviously, the history is more complicated than its view in popular culture, but that view is helpful in understanding how the duke is perceived and why, for instance, the statue has seen repeated vandalism. Catrìona (talk) 09:23, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Several of these references actually refer to the post-Culloden government campaign, largely over before L-G was born, let alone owned anything in Scotland. I note that the biography of his wife Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, Duchess of Sutherland has far more detail on the Highland landownings & clearances, and says in practice L-G left their management mostly to her. There's no need to go to extreme rhetoric to explain the lasting unpopularity of the Clearances. Nor do we actually know the precise motivations or thinking of the vandals. Nor do you seem to have any source actually mentioning "ethnic cleansing" in the context of the vandalism. So we shouldn't introduce it. Johnbod (talk) 14:16, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Catriona, if you feel that the highly partisan viewpoints in the links you have presented above are part of the story, then the job of the article becomes explaining why these views are wrong. This would be inflamatory. Hence my suggested action: to treat this as a historical article and use only sources that are reliable sources for that sort of article. I am not sure that Wikipedia is here to foster ignorance. The fact that vandalism occurs is just that, a fact. But the supposed reason for that vandalism is not fact, it is common misunderstanding that is fed by political posturing and class hatred.
 * Additionally, Wikipedia regards "mainstream" as mainstream within the relevant discipline. In this case, that discipline is history.
 * I think the most that the article should do is, after stating the historical facts, point out that there is a large difference between the view in popular culture and the researched opinions of historians. It is bizarre that the memorial fountain to Lady Sutherland in Golspie appears to go completely unscathed, yet she is the one who had ultimate management responsibility for the Sutherland clearances. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 15:29, 21 September 2018 (UTC)
 * I have just spotted this quote from Eric Richards, in his definitive "Highland Clearances" (p 52). It says: "Nevertheless, while the Hanoverians transparently sought to break the back of resistance in the Highlands, there was no serious effort to extirpate and eliminate the indigenous population." This is in response to the '45 rebellion. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 21:48, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

What interest to WikiProject Philately?
I am surprised to see the Duke described as being of interest to this particular WikiProject as he died at least 6 years before Sir Rowland Hill launched the Penny Post which employed the use of postage stamps. Did he have any involvement as an official in the postal system?Cloptonson (talk) 14:27, 21 December 2022 (UTC)