Scottish Highland Clearances

The Scottish Highland Clearances were a decades-long removal of tenant families from land whose owners judged sheep more profitable than the people who lived and worked there. In Burke Devore’s recollection, the history becomes more than a lesson in dispossession: a dictionary definition, pinned above his desk, reveals how official language can make the removal of human beings sound like an ordinary act of clearing space. He uses that history to frame modern corporate downsizing as a recurring contest over ownership, livelihood, and who gets counted as expendable.

The historical process

Until the late eighteenth century, the Scottish Highlands were inhabited mainly by tenant farmers. Poor families lived in small stone huts, made a modest living from the soil, and paid rent to landlords. The arrangement rested on a sharp distinction between living on land and owning it: the families might cultivate it and depend on it, but it did not belong to them.

Landlords, or the people acting as their accountants, came to see greater profit in replacing the inhabitants with sheep. Over roughly the next seventy years, families, clans, and villages were cleared from the land, which was then given over to flocks. The change was an economic calculation for those who controlled the property, but for those removed it meant losing homes and the ground on which their lives had been built.

Dispossession and its costs

The displaced tenants had lived on the land for generations. They had built houses, barns, and corrals and worked the soil, yet their labor and long presence did not give them ownership. That contrast is central to Burke’s account: people could shape a place, sustain it, and know no other home, while remaining vulnerable to the owner’s decision to put it to a more profitable use.

The families did not leave willingly. Some went to Ireland, some to North America, and some died of cold or starvation. Others resisted and were killed on the land from which they were being driven. Burke’s bitter correction—that it was not, after all, their land—does not lessen the injustice; it exposes the legal and economic logic that let dispossession proceed while the tenants’ work and attachment counted for little.

Burke’s card and the force of a definition

Burke first encountered the history in college, where he enjoyed history courses because they were stories and did well enough in them to raise his overall grade average. In one course, he and another student wrote a term paper on the Scottish Highland Clearances. His partner looked up the word clearance in the Oxford English Dictionary, and Burke remembered the definition. After losing his job, he checked it again during a day of what he calls legitimate library research, copied it onto a small three-by-five card, and pinned it above his desk.

The definition describes the clearing of land through the removal of wood, old houses, inhabitants, and other things. Burke attends to the punctuation: with one comma less, he observes, the inhabitants would have been folded into the definition’s final catchall. The grammatical distinction gives the people a separate place in the list, but it also shows how easily a record can reduce them to part of a general process of removal. His claim that history is written by the winners grows out of this small editorial detail: those with power can shape not only what happens, but the words that make it legible afterward.

From historical clearance to corporate downsizing

Burke connects the landlords of the earlier history to the people carrying out modern corporate downsizing. He describes them as literal descendants in some cases and spiritual descendants in all cases. The comparison turns on the same calculation: an owner decides that an existing population or workforce stands in the way of making more money, and those without control of the property must leave.

The card acquires its force in the room where Burke is trying to return to his own operation. On the first Sunday evening in June, Billy is at home with Marjorie while Burke sits alone in his office, intending to lose no more days before resuming work. The card had been there for months, dating from when he first understood that doing things the established way would not get him anywhere. Its warning about a desk that belongs to the owner, not the worker, translates the history of land clearance into the language of employment: loyalty and labor do not guarantee a right to remain when another arrangement promises greater profit.

The comparison makes the Scottish Highland Clearances a framework for Burke’s understanding of corporate power, not merely a historical parallel. In both cases, the people who have built their lives or work around a place may be treated as removable once an owner sees a more profitable use for it. The history on the card therefore sharpens the meaning of downsizing: what sounds like neutral management language can conceal the human consequences of a decision made elsewhere.