Talk:Highland Potato Famine

Having recently created the article I am having second thoughts about its title (Highlands and Islands Potato Famine (1846 - 1857)). I am not sure the 19th century famine extended into Orkney and Shetland (although potato dependence was probably very common in those island areas) and Highlands and Islands seems to be a late 19th century idea designed to combine in one area the Highlands of Scotland and the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland. Highlands does reasonably include the Hebrides (including the Western Isles) and was generally presumed to do so during the 19th century. I am planning a move to Highland Potato Famine (1846 - 1857). Laurel Bush 09:51, 31 May 2005 (UTC).

Agrigarian Crisis!!
I was appalled to read in this article that an editor had stated the Great Highland Famine is regarded no more than an agragarian crisis rather than a famine and the tone implies that it is somehow less of a disaster than the “all too real” famine in Ireland. So how many people have to die before a famine is all too real? Famine in China has resulted in 80 million Chinese people starving to death. So does the Irish famine pales when compared to the all too real Chinese famine? Of course the answer is no. If one life is lost due to a famine it is a tragedy. Symptoms of famine include disintegrating society, political corruption, instability, disorder and a breakdown of the moral economy and of course large scale emigration and death. All of which occurred in Scotland. I have removed the comment. Tabhara (talk) 18:55, 22 November 2009 (UTC)
 * But all the above are also symptoms of an agrarian crisis; with the possible exception of the winter of 1846-7 the problem was not that food was unavailable; it was that it was unaffordable - the Islands recovered not because they returned to self-sufficiency in food, but because they had easier access to cheap food from elsewhere, and could produce stuff they could sell to pay for it. Other parts of Scotland heavily dependent on potatoes as a staple food were sufficiently far from the edge that they scraped through the blight years. And yes, if one life is lost because of crop failure it is a tragedy; any death is a tragedy, but the concept of a one-death famine is surely somewhat unorthodox. Rjccumbria (talk) 22:00, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Gordon of Cluny & forcible emigration
I actually came onto the talk page to ask what the sources were for the claim that in the middle of the 19th century a landowner could force his tenants onto a ship and Shanghai them to Canada. As far as I can see from what the contemporary papers said about Barra, there were some evictions (c Whit 1850?) and the evictees were produced in various Scots towns (c Xmas 1850) to excite sympathy and increase pressure for action. (Gordon was a good target as notoriously rich and notoriously mean, but Barra was an economic basket case following the collapse of the kelp and fishing industies ( 80% of the population on relief)). In August 1851 three ships full of voluntary emigrants from Gordon's estates on Barra and Uist sailed for Canada. As the Glasgow Herald pointed out it would have been more sensible to feed them through a Scots winter and send them out in the spring, rather than send them out so late in the season that they would have to survive a Candian winter before they could do anything useful, but that aside voluntary emigration after eviction or under the threat of eviction is not the same as forcible emigration.Rjccumbria (talk) 22:00, 3 February 2015 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 17:54, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Barra - "The most destitute" emigrants "I ever saw"
The captioned section seems very overlong in order to comply with WP:PROPORTION.ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 19:29, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

revision 801455842
To answer the question "So why not just move the quote marks? -"improving landlord" was(is?) a standard (approbatory) term)":

(1) Some writers about the Highland Clearances and the Agricultural Revolution in the the Scottish Highlands persistently use quote marks around the word 'improvement' (in the context of 'agricultural improvement'). These tend to be those with a partisan view of this historical event - including sensationalist authors, journalists and politicians. It seems to me that their implication is that any improvement is imagined or illusory and that the agricultural situation is no better than before. The vast majority of historians do not do this (James Hunter is the exception to prove the rule - even John Prebble avoided quotes). I appreciate that the usage is a little different in the original sentence, but nevertheless feel that any Wikipedia article should avoid the reader taking the understanding/misunderstaning that the editor follows the more populist interpretation of history.

(2) Then we have a question of fact. The Highland Chiefs first came to look on themselves as landlords and then sought to realise greater returns from their estates. The first resort was to simply put the rent up, but that then translated into changing the agricultural system through improvement. Hence the form of words 'Chieftains become "improving landlords"' does not really fit with what happened: it was not a one-step change from Chieftain to agricultural improver.

(3) Not every clearance was for sheep. Relevant to this situation, some of the early clearances were to increase cattle production. (The later clearances for sporting estates are not significantly on the timeline up to the potato famine.) Hence addition of the word 'generally' is useful.

(4) The grammatical structure of the original sentence is somewhat opaque - and I have to confess that I misread it when editing. What I intended was to say "Chieftains became landlords, and planned improvements to achieve higher rental returns....". If we stick with the latest text, surely it should say "Chieftains-become-"improving-landlords" had found sheep-grazing to be the most remunerative form of agriculture....". In other words, the "chieftains become landlords" has to be hyphenated to make clear that this is the subject of the sentence - but the moment you stick the word 'improving' in there, together with the quote marks, it becomes (to my simple mind) somewhat clumsy and confusing. There are ground for further simplification of the grammar in this part of the article, including shorter sentences.

Hence I advocate the original edit that I made, with the correction of 'became' for 'become'. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 19:41, 20 September 2017 (UTC)


 * I'm not too worried about this, and I appreciate you not turning this into a revert war
 * Well, there was no intention to question the good intentions of the improving landlords, which seemed to be the implication of the edit summary. Conversely, and contrary to the popularising take on the chieftains ('heartless swine selling their tenants down the river so they could pay their tailors' bills') I think there was (sometimes?/often?) a bit more to the agricultural improvement movement than increasing rent-rolls, although doubtless that was a welcome outcome of increasing agricultural productivity. I would suggest the phrase "improving landlords" is retained, but wiki-linked to Scottish Agricultural Revolution, in which case it doesn't need the quotes to show it is a phase with meaning/implications.
 * Don't follow this at all, and I would wonder if it is associated with the misreading of 'become' as 'became'. The article isn't giving a step by step acount of what happened next, but an explanation of how the situation in the 1840s had arisen. Coastal crofting did not arise because of rent increases in situ; it arose when chieftains began to pursue an improving agenda; which (I thought) was what the article said.
 * No probs
 * Hard for me to argue the previous sentence structure was not confusing if you tell me it confused you, but hypenation-for-clarity as a new one on me; surely 'chieftains who had become improving landlords' would be the normal clarifying expansion.
 * I have tweaked the article text further in line with those responses Rjccumbria (talk) 19:03, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
 * OK - looks a lot better in the article now. On point 1, the failing is in the expectations of the reader, rather than what is written. Putting the word "improvement"/"improver" (etc.) in quotes is taken by some as a battle flag in the debate over whether the Highlands would be a much better place if improvement and the Clearances had not happened. (What do those people think would be the current status of such supposedly unchanged societies?) It just seems wise to avoid accidentally signalling a position in that debate.ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 19:33, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Getting Scottish units of measure right
This article seems to struggle with explaining the old Scottish measurements correctly. Note (g) says: In Scots customary measure, a peck of meal was about 9 litres, a boll 145 litres. There was a smaller Imperial peck, but no Imperial boll. (For comparison with rations quoted above 9 litres of oatmeal weighs about 5 kg) The first part of this has a reference. There is no reference for the second part of the note.

There are several problems with applying the source to the time of the Highland Potato Famine. Firstly, these measures had substantial regional differences at the time of the 1661 Linlithgow measures. Secondly, as the source states, "in 1824 an act of parliament imposed the English versions of Imperial measures and defined the proportions of older measures to Imperial measures". What actually happened, is that the boll became defined by weight (but still varying depending on what sort of substance was being weighed.) If you look at a near-contemporary commercial dictionary you find that a boll of oatmeal was 140 pounds (or 10 stone). I suggest that this is the measure that was used for measuring out famine relief supplies. 140 lbs is 63.5 kg.

However, following the weight given in note (g) for 9 litres (or a peck) of oatmeal weighing 5kg, this gives a boll as 16 X 5kg = 80 kg. This is roughly 25% higher than the 140 lbs / 63.5 kg measure.

I looked online for a volume/weight conversion for oatmeal. I found this which seems appropriate. One metric cup is 0.25 litres, which the converter site says would give a weight for rolled oats (different name for the same thing): 1 metric cup weighs 0.095102 kg, so one litre weighs 4 times this = 0.380408 kg. Applying this to the Linlithgow measures of 1661, a boll of oatmeal is 145.145 litres, so 145.145 X 0.380408 = 55.2 kg. This is roughly 13% less than the 140 lbs. To me, this suggests that the Linlithgow measurements are irrelevant to the time in question - and I would guess the whole subject confuses the living daylights out of a reader of the article.

It is important to get this right as any reader who is using Wikipedia to understand a contemporary source could easily end up with the wrong numbers. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 20:01, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Understatement of government involvement
This article understates the large amount of covert government involvement in the activities of the Central Board. That involvement is suggested by T M Devine to make the board "....almost a quasi-government agency". Trevelyan, McNeill and Coffin had a close oversight of what, outwardly, was an independent charitable organisation. Skene even goes so far as to have annotated a letter to Trevelyan with "Pray do not let these find their way into print". This suggests to me that the fundamental weakness in the article is reliance on contemporary newspapers - which, with the benefit of detailed historical research, we now see had the full facts withheld from them.

It is worth adding that, if proper recognition of government "behind the scenes" control of the relief effort is properly dealt with, the beliefs and attitudes of Trevelyan, Coffin and McNeill on the characteristics of the Gaels who they were tasked with helping should be included. Of course, these views were not held in isolation and were probably typical of anyone likely to have a government position at the time. Viewed with a modern eye, their opinions would be felt unacceptable. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 21:04, 14 December 2018 (UTC)


 * To go further on the 'fundamental weakness' stated above, I now feel that the extensive use of contemporary newspaper reports as sources for this article leaves it open to the criticism of being WP:OR. Whilst the conclusions reached by that (possible) original research are commendably close to those held by professional historians, they are not identical and have some significant gaps in the story. I suggest that a substantial rewrite is needed in due course. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 00:04, 28 December 2018 (UTC)

Blight Dies Away - units?
In the Highland_Potato_Famine section there is a table with no units marked. The surrounding text says "Sir James Matheson had spent £33,000", but the table has numbers like £150. This makes me think the table is probably meant to be in thousands of £? -- stillnotelf   is invisible  21:57, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
 * You need to read the table in the context of the paragraph and the article as a whole. The £33,000 was spent over 3 years at the height of the famine and the much smaller amounts are for years considered largely to be outside the period of the famine. So: the numbers are right. What the article does not make clear is that the affected populations made significant changes to their lives - many emigrated and those that remained as residents of the Highlands and Islands were deeply involved in working away from their homes as migrant workers. This reduced the demand for relief as many of those still living in the region were earning money and also were not living on their crofts whilst doing this work.
 * The article does need some improvement to make this clear, and the injection of some secondary sources to support the text. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 23:28, 5 July 2019 (UTC)