the Clearances

The Clearances are the removal of tenant-farming communities from the Scottish Highlands, but in Burke Devore’s account the term reaches beyond a historical episode: it becomes a way to name the human cost hidden inside the language of corporate downsizing. A definition pinned above his office desk turns the history of families displaced for sheep into a pointed analogy for workers displaced for profit.

Historical Meaning

Burke recalls a Highlands populated, until the late eighteenth century, mainly by tenant farmers: poor families living in small stone huts, making a modest living from the soil, and paying rent to a landlord. The decisive change comes when landlords, or the people acting as their accountants, recognize that the land can make more money if people are removed and sheep take their place. In this telling, the Clearances are not simply a change in land use. They are a calculation that puts profitability ahead of the lives already bound to the land.

For roughly seventy years, families, clans, and villages were cleared away. The tenants had lived there for generations and had built houses, barns, and corrals and worked the soil, yet the land was not legally theirs. That contradiction gives the displacement its particular force: long residence and labor do not protect them when ownership rests elsewhere. They leave unwillingly; some go to Ireland or North America, some die of cold or starvation, and some resist and are killed on the land they have called home. Burke’s bleak correction—“Well, no; not their own land”—makes property ownership the bitter hinge of the story.

The Dictionary Card

The allusion is material as well as intellectual. Burke learned about the Clearances in college, where he enjoyed history because it offered stories and helped raise his grade average. Later, while he and another student were writing a term paper about them, his partner looked up the word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Burke remembered the definition well enough to seek it out again during a period of legitimate library research after he had been laid off. He copied it onto a little 3x5 card and push-pinned it above his desk, where it remained in view.

The card defines clearance as “The clearing (of land) by the removal of wood, old houses, inhabitants, etc.” Its compact, matter-of-fact phrasing does the work Burke wants from it. Houses and people sit within a list of things to be removed, while the bureaucratic sound of “clearing” makes forced displacement resemble routine maintenance. Burke observes that the definition offers proof that history is written by the winners: a comma less, he says, and the inhabitants would have disappeared into “etc.” The punctuation becomes a figure for historical erasure. It marks a boundary between naming the people who suffered and letting them vanish into a category that no longer needs to be specified.

From Land Clearance to Downsizing

Burke carries the historical term into the present by comparing Highland landlords with the people responsible for corporate downsizing. He calls them the landlords’ literal descendants in some cases and their spiritual descendants always. The parallel is not that workers and tenant farmers have identical circumstances; it is that both can be treated as removable when an owner sees a more profitable use for what they occupy or do. In the modern version, the replacement is another worker—the “sheep” in Burke’s analogy—and the decision is presented as an owner’s economic right.

The address turns that comparison into direct warning. A worker may believe that years of loyalty and effort create a claim on a desk, or that the company owes something in return. Burke answers with the blunt command, “Well, it isn’t your desk. Clear it.” The echoed verb links a contemporary job loss to the historical removal of inhabitants, compressing an institutional decision into the physical image of being made to leave. The analogy also exposes what the language of efficiency can conceal: a person’s labor and attachment do not amount to ownership, and the prospect of greater profit can outweigh both.

The Expression in Burke’s Present

The card appears on a Sunday evening, the first of June. After dinner, while Billy watches television with Marjorie and Betsy, Burke sits in his office and looks at it instead of immediately returning to his operation. He has been considering for months that doing things the conventional way will get him nowhere; the card preserves the history and wording through which he has come to understand that failure. Its position above the desk makes the analogy a constant presence at the place where he plans and works.

The passage then moves from the general claim to a named target: Burke says that he will visit Garrett Roger Blackstone the following day, after dropping Marjorie off at her appointment. That placement gives the Clearances more than the function of an explanation for layoffs. The word helps organize Burke’s own interpretation of what has been done to him, even as he prepares to act against another person competing for employment. Its force lies in that tension: the history of people treated as expendable supplies Burke with a language of injury, while his own use of the analogy is tied to an operation that turns a human rival into a target. The card’s neat dictionary definition thus hangs above a present-day plan whose consequences are not contained by the orderly language of removal.