Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 1 (2011), p. 139

The Sutherland Estate – one of the largest estates in western Europe during the nineteenth century at over a million acres – became synonymous in radical discourse with oppression and rapacious landlordism as a result of the Clearances of the period 1807–1820. The marriage in 1785 of Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, with George Leveson-Gower, had permitted agricultural reforms and social engineering to be executed on an unprecedented scale in the most northerly estate on the British mainland. By 1850, the second Duke of Sutherland had been partially successful in recasting the family in a more benevolent, patrician light. Indeed, eleven years after his death, the Irish nationalist Freeman’s Journal (13 Sept. 1872), wrote that the third Duke showed ‘excellent intentions’, ‘practical philanthropy’ and ‘paternal energy’, praising the money expended on reclamation and resettlement projects. In this enlightened landlordism, believed the Freeman, could be found a fine example for Ireland. In her meticulous study, Annie Tindley has produced a work that goes beyond the polarised polemics of earlier works on Sutherland Estate, and presents a model for studies of specific estates. She demonstrates clearly the extent to which apparently ‘local’ issues in a peripheral area of Britain were intimately connected to much wider British and Imperial economic and social debates.

The Sutherland Estate, 1850–1920 is arranged thematically within a chronological structure, and often focuses on the lives and personalities of the estate managers, explaining how their attitudes illuminated broader political events and social issues. The vast size of the estate ensured that, if the ducal family hoped to have effective management, it needed to be split into three smaller units: the Tongue, Dunrobin and Scourie managements. These estate managers exerted considerable local power, and Evander MacIver, the factor of Scourie from 1845 until 1895 – whose face stares out from the cover of the book – was the example par excellence of a local dictator: trusted by the ruling family and secure in his own belief that he knew what was best for the tenants, yet constantly bewildered by the lack of gratitude shown by those tenants for his and the estate’s benevolence.

The book’s main narrative commences in 1850, at a time when much of the Highland region was emerging from a destructive famine which was, in a few local cases, as damaging as the simultaneous crisis in Ireland. The west coast of Sutherlandshire was badly affected, and one of the interesting features of the 1850s was the concern of the estate management about ‘agitation’ – which was a local reaction to hunger but was also treated as a possible local manifestation of European ‘socialism’ (p. 13). The incredulity of the estate that the crofting population could challenge the landowners’ hegemony is a constant theme throughout the period covered. In 1890, for example, Evander MacIver wrote that ‘socialism is speeding fast’ (p. 94). It is extremely interesting to note that, although contemporaries often highlighted the baneful influence of Ireland on the crofters, John Box, Factor of Tongue, feared in 1889 that some young crofters from Bettyhill – recently returned from seasonal work in America – had imported ‘all sorts of democratic, even communistic views’ from the USA (p. 102).

Chapter Two deals with the huge drainage and reclamation project undertaken by the third Duke between 1869 and 1893, a scheme which Tindley argues (p. 47) was ‘unique in nineteenth-century British agriculture, in terms of the scale of both acreage and expenditure’, and is central to the book’s thesis, which demands a nuanced and qualified approach to any charges of rapacious landlordism in Sutherland in the nineteenth-century. References to the coal-mining works at Brora (p. 35), which were developed to support the nascent brickworks and lime kilns in the area, are fascinating. Along with the third Duke’s role in the development of the Highland Railway, it is clear from Tindley’s research that, although the ducal family and their estate management may have harboured hopes of making money from their Highland holdings, and even of ‘improving’ the lives of their crofting tenants as a result, Sutherlandshire remained a financial black hole for a fortune gained elsewhere.

Overall, the book shows convincingly that the attitudes of the estate management had changed little from the racially charged ‘improvement’ mindset of Patrick Sellar and his colleagues. It is possible to identify a thread running through the management of the Sutherland estate, which was informed by paternalism of the clumsiest kind. The book further demonstrates that, far from the smooth-running behemoth of popular discourse, the Sutherland estate was an ‘often tortured, overelaborate structure, ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of the period’ (p. 173). Dr Tindley is to be congratulated not only for undertaking a mammoth task in assiduously working through these papers, but also presenting the results in such a thorough, wellanalysed and readable manner. She has set a high standard for further research on individual estates.