The Scottish Highlands enter the narrative as both a historical landscape and a model for understanding dispossession. Burke Devore recalls the Clearances, when tenant families were removed so that landlords could replace them with sheep, and makes that history a measure of corporate downsizing. The region’s decisive significance lies in the parallel he draws between people treated as inhabitants of a place and people treated as expendable workers: long service does not give them ownership or protect them when someone else sees a more profitable use for what they occupy.

Land, tenants, and the Clearances

Until the late eighteenth century, the Highlands were populated mainly by tenant farmers. Poor families lived in small stone huts and eked out a modest living from the soil while paying rent to a landlord. The arrangement made their connection to the land intimate but precarious: families had built houses, barns, and corrals and worked the soil for generations, yet none of that made the land theirs.

The change began when landlords, or the people acting as their accountants, saw that sheep could make more money than the human beings living on the land. Over roughly the next seventy years, the process known as the Clearances removed families, clans, and villages. The economic calculation is stark in Burke’s account: the land’s value is measured by the use that will yield more income, while the lives and labor already rooted there do not confer a right to remain.

The account emphasizes that removal was not a voluntary migration. Some tenants went to Ireland, some to North America, and some, in Burke’s bitter phrasing, went to hell. Some died from cold or starvation. Others resisted and were killed on the land they had treated as home, though Burke immediately corrects the possessive implication: it was not legally theirs. That correction makes the contradiction central to the history. They had occupied, built, and cultivated the place across generations, but ownership rested elsewhere.

A definition kept on a card

Burke first encountered the history in college, where he enjoyed history courses because they were stories and helped raise his overall grade average. In one year, he and another student wrote a term paper on the Clearances. His partner consulted the Oxford English Dictionary, and Burke remembered the definition so strongly that, after losing his job, he looked it up again during a period of legitimate library research to make sure he had its wording right.

He copied the definition onto a small three-by-five card and push-pinned it above the desk in his office: “The clearing (of land) by the removal of wood, old houses, inhabitants, etc.” The card turns a dictionary entry into a compact record of how language can frame dispossession. Burke observes that removing one comma would have placed the inhabitants inside the definition’s final catchall, as though people were simply another item to clear away. His reading of the wording makes the history’s violence visible not only in what happened to tenants but also in the terms used to describe the removal.

From historical clearing to corporate downsizing

The card was put up months before the Sunday evening on which Burke pauses to study it again. By then, he has come to believe that doing things the conventional way will not get him anywhere, and he is considering a return to his operation. The scene connects the historical reflection to his present condition without making the Highlands a literal setting for his employment troubles: the old account is material he carries into his office, where the card remains in his line of sight.

Burke casts the people behind modern downsizing as descendants of the landlords who cleared the Highlands, sometimes literally and always spiritually. The comparison is his interpretation, not an assertion that the historical events and corporate layoffs are identical. Its force comes from the shared logic he identifies: an owner decides that greater profit is possible by replacing the people currently using a resource. In the historical account, the replacement is sheep; in Burke’s contemporary analogy, it is another worker. The employee’s loyalty and years of effort, like the tenant’s labor on the soil, do not amount to ownership.

The region’s meaning in Burke’s reflection

The Highlands give Burke a history through which to explain why attachment and contribution may fail to protect people under a system organized around ownership and profit. The tenant farmers’ houses and fields demonstrate how thoroughly a community can shape a place without controlling its future. The sheep represent the more profitable replacement, while the displaced families reveal the human cost that an accounting of land use can omit.

That contrast also sharpens the card’s role in the scene. Burke has not merely preserved an interesting definition from a college paper; after his layoff, he returns to it as a way of reading his own exposure to decisions made elsewhere. The historical place supplies the analogy, and the dictionary supplies its unsettling language. Together, they make the Clearances a recurring interpretive frame for his understanding of the modern workplace: those who depend on a place or an employer may be removed once the owner decides that another use will pay better.