Book of abstracts and biographies

Thurdsay, June 26, 2025

Morning: Land and power in Scotland, historical perspectives

9.30-10.30am

Keynote conference 1: Annie Tindley (Université de Newcastle) – "Feudal power and the politics of Clearance: the value(s) of land and the limits of landed power in Scotland, c. 1800-the present"

11-1am

Session 1

- John R. Young (University of Strathclyde) – “The pre-1707 Scottish Parliament and the use of forfeiture as a legal and political weapon”

Abstract: This paper will give an overview of the use of forfeiture by the Scottish Parliament as a means of enforcing political control and the punishment of rebels via a formal legal and parliamentary mechanism for the forfeiture of lives, lands, and goods. It will examine the nature of the parliamentary processes involved and will then proceed to focus on key high profile case studies. These include, but are not restricted to, the use of forfeiture in the War(s) for The Three Kingdoms, a high profile example being the 1645 forfeiture of James Graham, fifth Earl and first Marquis of Montrose. Forfeiture was therefore one of the key mechanisms for punishing Royalists during the Montrose Rebellion in Scotland, but forfeiture was also used in the later punishment of rebels involved in the abortive 1685 Argyll rebellion against King James VII. Arguably, the most high profile forfeiture in Scottish History is in fact the forfeiture of the Scottish crown of James VII by the 1689 Claim of Right. Furthermore, at the Revolution of 1688-90 a Committee for Fines and Forfeitures was established on 9 May 1690. Yet forfeitures could be rescinded too in the context of the nature of the regimes in power. The Restoration Parliament of 1661-63, for example, rescinded forfeitures that had been enacted by the Covenanting Parliaments. Forfeiture was therefore a powerful political and legal weapon that could be employed to punish individuals, but it could likewise have an impact on landed and territorial rights on individual families within the Scottish nobility and aristocracy.

Bio: Dr John R. Young is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He is a double graduate of the University of Glasgow, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He specialises in early modern Scottish History, including the history of the pre-1707 Scottish Parliament, the 1707 Act of Union, the Covenanters, and Scotland’s relations with Ulster. He is the editor of the journal Parliaments, Estates & Representation, published by Taylor and Francis. PER is the journal of The International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions. His work on Scottish parliamentary history has been published in publications of The French National Assembly and the parliaments of Catalonia, Poland and Portugal. His latest article is on ‘The President of the Scottish Parliament, 1640-1651’, in Maria Betlem Castellà Pujols, Martí Grau Segú and Mikel Urquijo (eds), Presidencies of Parliamentary and Representative Institutions, 1500-2000 (Madrid, 2024).

- Juliette DESPORTES (University of Glasgow) – "The Language of the Land in Scottish Highland Petitions, 1745-1784"

Abstract: Tenant petitions in Scottish landed estates have not been the subject of sustained historical analysis, with the notable exception of R. A. Houston’s Peasant Petitions. And yet petitions offer a rare, if mediated, access to voices ‘from below’ and the ways in which Scottish tenants spoke the language of the land as they attempted to secure, protect, and preserve their customary and legal rights. This paper explores tenurial petitions issued by Annexed Estates tenants between 1745 and 1784. First confiscated and then permanently annexed by the British Crown following the 1745 Jacobite rising, the Annexed Estates covered large tracts of land in the Scottish Highlands from the straths of Perthshire to the hills of Cromarty. For a period of thirty-two years, the estates were managed by a Crown-appointed Board of Commissioners who sought to root out what they saw as indigenous backwardness. In turn, petitions addressed to the Commissioners reveal the range and variety of Highland tenurial experiences in the second half of the eighteenth century as tenants reacted to new ‘improving’ policies seeking to maximise the land’s returns and profitability. Petitions were then an essential medium through which tenants could exploit the language of agrarian improvement to condone or circumvent profit-driven attitudes to the land. Although always written in English, petitions reflected Gaelic ideologies as tenants relied on claims of legitimacy, belonging, and ancestral ties to make their case for land. While much of the history of the Highlands and Islands has been defined by the social and ideological conflict taking place between the ‘people above’ and the ‘people below’, the tenantry was not a homogenous group. Petitions suggest that tenants’ attitudes towards commercialism, landed authority, and ‘improved’ landholding patterns depended on their economic situation and the local context.

Bio: Dr Juliette Desportes is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the University of the Highlands and Islands on the Leverhulme Trust funded project "Resistance to ‘improvement’ in the Highlands and Islands, 1750-1820". She completed her doctorate at the University of Glasgow in 2024. Her thesis focused on the effects of agrarian improvement in Scotland in the long eighteenth century, taking as a case study the Highland landed estates annexed by the British Crown after the 1745 Jacobite rising.

- Regina PÖRTNER (University of Swansea) – "'The National Debt no National Grievance'. The Scottish land question and the debate on public finance in Britain, 1762-1820"

Abstract: This paper will investigate the significance of landed property to Scotland’s place in the national debate on credit and the state of public finances in the last third of the eighteenth century, and in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Scottish proponents of a closer union with England and their English counterparts perceived the fiscal crises as an opportunity for, as they saw it, liberating Scotland’s society and economy from the shackles of their feudal past. They met with opposition from a substantial part of Scotland’s landed elite who desired more limited legal reform to suit their financial needs without risking further-reaching changes to Scotland’s social and political status quo. The paper will argue that, to fully appreciate the significance of the Scottish debate on the land question, it is necessary to not only take into account its domestic and Imperial dimension, but also place the Scottish case in a European perspective because there were comparable struggles of reform and reaction in continental Europe to which landed property and the power of disposition over it were central. Against the background of the spiralling costs of warfare, the expansion of trade and commerce, a corresponding rise in the demand for public and private credit, and the Scottish banking and payment crisis in 1762-1772, Scotland’s lawyers and political economists urged the British government to undertake root-and-branch reforms of the laws regulating aristocratic inheritance, and specifically of the restrictive practice of passing on aristocratic landed property by entail. By prohibiting the alienation and mortgaging of estates, permanent entails constrained the scope for private credit in particular, as landed property continued to be the most important credit security. While comparable laws regarding fideicommissaexisted in many parts of mainland Europe, the case of Scotland is arguably unique as a result of the growing popularity of strict entails (tailzies) since the late seventeenth century. This trend had a direct and measurable effect on the price of land and credit, levels of investment in commerce and agricultural improvement, and the scope for public credit and taxation during the period 1760-1820. The reform or abolition of entails thus became an objective of actual as well as symbolic significance for Scotland’s reform-minded lawyers and supporters among the landed classes. The paper will argue that the achievements and limitations of their quest for substantive reform is in many respects revealing of the challenges confronting Scotland as an aspiring partner in the Anglo-Scottish Union and nascent Imperial state. As the paper will seek to demonstrate, the land question presented itself in different forms but with no less urgency in continental Europe’s Old Regime states and warfaring nations.

Bio: Regina Poertner, D.Phil., Associate Professor of Modern History, Swansea University (UK). Major publications include monographs on the Counter-Reformation in the Habsburg Monarchy (OUP 2001), and on the constitutional debates of the British Civil War (Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 2009). I studied General and Medieval History, Economic History, and German, for a Master’s Degree at the universities of Bochum and Oxford. I am a Rhodes Scholar, and hold a D.Phil. in Modern History from Oxford University. Prior to joining Swansea University in 2005, I was a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in London and Lecturer in History at the University of Bochum.

- Thomas ARCHAMBAUD (University Paris-Sorbonne) – "Improvements strategies and reactionary politics: the Macphersons, Sir John Sinclair and land management in Scotland, 1780-1820"

Abstract: This paper proposes to explore issue of land management in Scotland between 1780 and 1820. It aims to uncover the connection between Empire, clearances and reactionary politics in the ‘Age of Revolutions’ (Armitage, Subrahmanyam, 2011). Based on the correspondence of the Scottish MP Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, James Macpherson and Sir John Macpherson, this paper looks at how the capital repatriation strategies in the Highlands translated into political power at home. The first case study will be James ‘Ossian’ Macpherson, a pro-EIC lobbyist and chiefly remembered today for his ‘translations’ of the poems of Ossian. Alongside his kinsmen Sir John Macpherson, former governor-general of Bengal, and Col. Allan Macpherson of Blairgowrie, a military officer and interpreter in India, James Macpherson promoted agrarian modernisation in the guise of sentimental clanship. This paper will concentrate on the Macphersons’ post-clanship strategies of land acquisition and colonial remittance. Contrary to John, influenced by the physiocrats and the example of Voltaire in Ferney, James Macpherson adopted a more practical attitude towards land and afforestation, using Gaelic topography and a primitivist philosophy of nature to re-indigenise colonial capital. Allan Macpherson established himself in rural Perthshire as a more impecunious and benevolent landlord involved in road building and industrial development. The Macphersons’ ecologies of land will also be examined through the lens of their political affiliations in Parliament as MPs from the 1760s to the 1790s. This paper examines how the Macphersons and Sinclair, all products of the Scottish Enlightenment and the Empire, responded to the ‘rival ecologies’ in the age of Enlightenment and Highland clearances (Albritton Jonsson). Focusing on the correspondence of Sir John Sinclair, an Ossian enthusiast, this paper shows how the ideology of Highland improvements aligned itself with a staunch defence of the East India Company at the House of Commons in the 1790s. It demonstrates how Sinclair’s ‘armed neutrality’ against France, i. e., a trans-partisan coalition against revolutionary France, acted as a platform for the preservation of the wealth and status of Scotland’s prominent landowners. This lobbying group, which resisted land redistribution and intensified colonial investments, invites us to reconsider how imperial profits, clearances and anti-Jacobin politics intersected in Scotland at the turning of the century. 

Bio: Thomas Archambaud has recently completed his doctorate at the University of Glasgow, co-supervised by the Centre Roland Mousnier (Université Paris-Sorbonne). His dissertation, entitled ‘Literary agents, patronage brokers and imperial administrators: the Macphersons and ancien régime global Empire in America and India’, examines the integration of the Macphersons into the British Empire, and the East India Company in particular, from the end of the Seven Years’ War to the eve of the French Revolution. His research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Scottish Historical Review Trust.

- Scott MACFIE (University of Glasgow) – "‘Shameful Tyranny!’: Land and Politics on the Dumfries Estate, 1832-1841"

Abstract: Land is rarely represented as a political asset in the modern age, when its social, economic and environmental dimensions are typically prioritised. However, leasing land acquired a political dimension in the decades after the Reform Act of 1832, which granted a vote to tenant farmers paying rent of £50 or more for their farms. From then on, landowners who sought to maintain their political ‘interest’ did so by transforming tenants on their estates into blocks of loyal voters. This paper will focus on the Dumfries estate in eastern Ayrshire, where in the decade after 1832, the proprietor John Crichton-Stuart, 2nd Marquess of Bute implemented new strategies to persuade, and coerce, his tenants into supporting his preferred Tory candidate. At its most extreme, tenants who voted Whig or radical lost their farms to warn their neighbours against disobeying their landlord’s authority. Denying tenancies to women whose names could not be added to the electoral roll and buying leaseholds in the nearby town of Cumnock to prevent them being purchased by, and thus enfranchising, radical weavers were similarly devised to maximise the number of Tory voters per acre on the estate. This case study will illuminate the ongoing political value of land during the era of the Industrial Revolution, as the Scottish nobility retained a semi-feudal desire to create a following of loyal retainers. Leveraging their monopolisation of access to land enabled them to intimidate their tenants and bolster their political influence. The paper’s focus on a Lowland estate can also act as a corrective to the overwhelming scholarly focus on the Highlands in the early nineteenth-century, during the era of ‘the Clearances’, and shine a light on patterns of landholding in another part of Scotland.

Bio: I am a second year PhD candidate in History at the University of Glasgow. My research focuses on agricultural improvement and the management of landed estates in central-west Scotland between 1750 and 1850. The relationship between land and power is the primary theme of my research.

Afternoon: Land and power in Scotland, legal perspectives

2-3pm

-       Keynote conference 2: Andrew Wightman (former MSP for Lothian an author of The Poor Had No Lawyers, Who Owns Scotland) – "Scot Land and the Environment"

3.30-5.30pm

Session 2

- Thomas SHERMAN (University of Cambridge) – "Property Rights and Historical Legitimacy in the Scottish School"

Abstract: James Mill, described by his son as the “last of the Scottish school”, supported his justification for British expansion across the Indian subcontinent with two key philosophical frameworks. Firstly, that the “idea of property” was “connected by nature” to the rights and privileges associated with political control, since he perceived the relationship between “ownership of the land” and “government” as foundational to sovereignty. From this, he proposed that British rule over the Indian subcontinent would benefit the indigenous population since Britain’s conception of property rights allowed for the “proper” use of land, which he labelled as the “immovable property”. This highlights the second philosophical framework utilised by Mill; nations without ‘correct’ property rights lacked historical legitimacy. ‘Historical legitimacy’ in this paper is defined as the ability for nations to progress along, to use Mill’s words, the “scale of civilisation”. Mill’s education under Dugald Stewart, who established the canon of the ‘Scottish school’, was instrumental in the formation of his claims. Political philosophers associated with the Scottish school sought to portray juridical speculation about property rights as foundational for constitutional systems. What this paper proposes is that these arguments had a markedly historical dimension that continues to lack deserved acknowledgment. It is not the historical development of property rights that is under scrutiny here, as has been studied by historians such as James Moore. Instead, it is how property rights and concepts of land were used to support historical methodologies within the Scottish school. Whether that be Adam Smith’s association of different “laws and regulations with regards to property” with “different ages”, or David Hume’s assertion that the creation of “inequality of property” shaped a nation’s historical “habits and manners”, there was a recurrent use of property rights in how a nation’s historical legitimacy was presented within the Scottish School.

Bio: Thomas Sherman is a second year PhD student studying Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge, where he focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British philosophy of history and imperial politics. His thesis analyses how James Mill’s historical methodology, alongside his political and economic thought, shaped his justification for the British Empire.

- Alexander JORDAN (Metropolitan University Prague) - "Thomas Carlyle and the Land Question"

Abstract: Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was arguably the most influential Scottish thinker of the nineteenth century. Although studied in detail from a literary point of view, he has attracted less attention from historians of political thought. Through a close, comprehensive, and contextualised reading of Carlyle’s oeuvre, the proposed paper will reconstruct Carlyle’s opinions on the land question, not only in his native Scotland, but also in Britain and Ireland more generally. In the secondary literature, Carlyle is still referred to as a “Tory”, a “conservative”, a “reactionary”, etc., largely due to the idealised image of the medieval aristocracy that he set out in Past and Present (1843). However, such narrow readings have obscured Carlyle’s ferocious hostility to the landed aristocracy of his own century. Brought up in a peasant family in Dumfries and Galloway, Carlyle’s father frequently clashed with their “Jackal Landlord”. In 1830, Carlyle wrote in his diary: “the Nobles of [this] country have maintained a quite despicable behaviour, from the times of Wallace downwards. A selfish, ferocious, famishing, unprincipled set of hyenas”. In The French Revolution (1837), Carlyle argued that the French aristocracy had exploited the peasantry for centuries and had got what they deserved, and in Past and Present (1843), he inveighed against “the Idle Aristocracy” of England, which, if it did not reform itself, would soon suffer the same fate. Even more radically, Past and Present rejected any absolute right to private property in land, Carlyle writing: “the Land belongs to these two: To the Almighty God; and to all His Children of Men that have ever worked well on it, or that shall ever work well on it”. During the late 1840s, Carlyle furiously condemned the landlords of Ireland and called for the division of great estates, the institution of tenant right, and the cultivation of wastelands by the state. Carlyle’s writings on the land question provided grist to the mills of Chartists, proponents of land nationalisation, and the founders of the Independent Labour Party, all of whom quoted him abundantly.

Bio: Alexander Jordan is Assistant Professor of Anglophone Studies at Metropolitan University Prague. He received his PhD in intellectual history and the history of political thought from the European University Institute, and held postdoctoral fellowships in Turin, Erfurt, and Göttingen. He is the author of numerous articles on Thomas Carlyle, including in The English Historical Review, The Journal of British Studies, The Historical Journal, The Scottish Historical Review, and History of European Ideas. He is currently finalising a book manuscript entitled Noble Just Industrialism: Work, Socialism, and Empire in the Thought of Thomas Carlyle.

- Edwige CAMP-PIETRAIN (UPHF Valenciennes) – "The Land Reform Act 2003, a flagship policy in the early stages of devolution"

Abstract: A la fin du XXe siècle, la concentration de la propriété foncière écossaise, sans équivalent en Europe occidentale, était associée aux institutions britanniques, centralisées, accordant un pouvoir disproportionné aux élites foncières. Toute réforme constitutionnelle, dévolution ou indépendance, devait permettre de mettre un terme à cette situation inéquitable, au sein d’une chambre unique, élue démocratiquement. La demande émanait également de la société civile. Qui plus est, le premier gouvernement écossais de coalition était dirigé par deux juristes, désireux d’abolir les archaïsmes juridiques. Dès la première législature, un projet de loi a été déposé et discuté, afin d’instaurer un droit d’accès aux propriétés privées et un droit de rachat collectif des propriétés foncières. A l’issue de longs débats au cours desquels les partis politiques réformistes ont dû revoir leurs ambitions face à des intérêts puissants, la loi adoptée en 2003 a ouvert des possibilités, encadrées et limitées, sans remettre en cause la concentration de la propriété foncière. Ce Land Reform reste emblématique des débuts de la dévolution puisque les principes se sont heurtés aux réalités juridiques, politiques et sociales. Cette communication, centrée sur l’analyse des débats parlementaires en session plénière et en commission, mettra en évidence l’écart entre les ambitions initiales et les réformes adoptées.

Bio: Edwige Camp-Pietrain est Professeur des Universités en civilisation britannique. Ses recherches portent sur l’Ecosse contemporaine : vie politique, institutions, politiques publiques. 

- Calum ROSS (solicitor, Law Society of Scotland, University of Edinburgh) – “Mortensen v Peters (1906) in context: a surcease of environmental justice?”

Abstract: “We will have to take the Skye crofters’ style of it […] the fishermen have been restrained by grace, but we who have families are not going to see them starve and the food which God gave us destroyed.” / “No other country would be so altruistic as to grant a monopoly of fishing […] to the foreigner whilst excluding the native fishermen.” Approximately 52% of Scotland's total territorial area is seabed – ‘national public land’. This paper places that environment into a context of environmental justice. The mechanisation of bottom trawling – the fishing practice of dragging weighted nets along the seabed - enabled unprecedented levels of catch. The economic potential was accompanied by questions of sustainability and justice for artisanal fishers, all in a culture of scientific misinformation.  These factors continue to inform the trawling debate in Scotland. The High Court decision in Mortensen – that legislation rendering trawling unlawful was effective on UK and foreign vessels - inflated the tension to the international stage. Diplomatic intervention had the effect that the legislation was thereafter enforced solely against UK vessels. This irregularity - Scottish authorities being impotent to enforce Scots law against foreign trawlers – contributed to the growth of nationalism and environmentalism. Understudied efforts of resolution over decades through diplomatic, legal and scientific routes serve as a microcosm of the growth of international environmental law, and of UK intergovernmental relations. The withdrawal of the UK from both the EU and the London Fisheries Convention in 2020 has seen the reemergence of fisheries to political prominence. Whilst Mortensen is well known to students of international law, there has been little discussion of the socio-legal context. This paper will lay the groundwork for filling the gap, question misinformation and provide context for modern policy-makers – highlighting the ineffectualness of marine environmental law without international cooperation. 

Bio: Calum M Ross is a solicitor qualified in Scotland. He is a member, and currently interim convenor, of the marine policy sub-committee of the Law Society of Scotland. He is also employed by the University of Edinburgh as an undergraduate tutor in EU Law.

- Carey DOYLE (SRUC, Scotland’s Rural College) – "Searching for Community Empowerment: Success and Scotland's Community Rights to Buy"

Abstract: A cornerstone of Scottish land reform are the Community Rights to Buy, comprising four Community Rights to Buy under the 2003 Land Reform Act (as amended) and 2016 Land Reform Act.  These rights are designed to support community-level democratic control over land in the public interest, and include first right of refusal on a land sale as well as forced sale.  The Rights are often referenced, but there is little detailed analysis of their operation, particularly outside the legal field. This paper contributes to knowledge by providing descriptive statistical data on Community Rights to Buy over their 22 years of operations, highlighting key trends.  Drawing on this data and four years of practical experience working with community groups and decision-makers on applications for the Community Rights to Buy, this data is conceptually situated through  understandings of 'success'.  This explores success rates, 'shadow' success, community success, and policy success. In synthesis the paper develops a conceptual contribution to understandings of community empowerment praxis, speaking to tensions between democracy,  law and operationalising the commons, and power therein. 

Bio: Carey Doyle is a chartered town planner with 20 years of experience at the intersection of academia and practice.  She has significant expertise in land governance for sustainable and inclusive development. Since 2020 her work has centred on Scottish Land Reform, first delivering a high-profile action research project on community landownership for Community Land Scotland, and now leading on research at Scotland’s Rural College.  Her research interests focus on land, communities, governance and power. Her PhD on rural demographic change and land use planning developed a normative framework for inclusive rural planning, and she has published on diverse topics including town planning and community landownership; housing; social division and migration; and inclusive engagement.

Friday, June 27, 2025

Morning: Land and power in Scotland, environmental perspectives

9.30-10.30am

Keynote 3: Richard Oram (University of Stirling) – "Historicising Environment and Environmental Change in 21st-century Scotland"

- Emma BELL (University of Savoie Mont-Blanc, Chambéry) – "Commoning the rewilding agenda in Scotland"

Abstract: In the past decade and more ‘rewilding’ has come to be widely regarded as a key weapon in the fight against climate change. It is estimated that there are over 150 rewilding projects in place across Scotland, and in December 2024 civil society organisations urged the Scottish Government to commit to rewilding 30% of the nation’s land and sea, making Scotland the world’s first ‘rewilding nation’. In 2023 the Scottish Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor endorsed a definition of rewilding that can be used by the Scottish Government and wider public sector. It is a definition that supports ‘inclusive rewilding’, recognising that ‘rewilding should be achieved by processes that engage and ideally benefit local communities, in line with Scotland's Land Rights and Responsibilities Statement, to support a Just Transition’. Yet, nature restoration projects often go hand-in-hand with carbon off-setting projects which allow for the commodification of nature by allowing polluters to buy carbon credits to cancel out their carbon emissions. This has led to concerns that, far from rewilding representing an opportunity to further the government’s dual aims of promoting land justice and community empowerment alongside tackling climate change, it may actually undermine these objectives by exacerbating land injustice, notably by pushing up the value of land and pitting community against corporate interests. This paper argues that a rewilding agenda that works in the interests of both nature and communities, promoting a truly ‘just’ transition, should be informed by practices of commoning whereby land is owned and managed collectively in a way that furthers genuine self-governance and empowerment, favouring radical democratic practices that allow for ‘community-led placemaking’. This would bring benefits to local communities that go far beyond the pecuniary. Drawing on parliamentary debates and policy papers, this paper will explore to what extent the Scottish Government commits to such a vision.

Bio: Emma Bell is Professor of Contemporary British Politics at Savoie Mont-Blanc University in Chambéry, France. Her current research focuses on positive place-making, localised democratic praxis and challenges to state authoritarianism. She is co-editor (with Filippo Barbera) of Commons, Citizenship and Power: Reclaiming the Margins (Bristol University Press, 2025) and has recently submitted a paper for publication entitled ‘Countering Remotisation through Community-led Place-making: A Scottish case study’, based on field research carried out in spring 2024 in Collieston, a small coastal village in Aberdeenshire.

- Iain ROBERTSON (University of the Highlands and Islands) – "Attitudes to land, environment and landscape in the Highlands and Islands between 1746 and 2021 as resistance and heritage"

Abstract: Land in the post-Culloden Highlands and Islands was never automatically and axiomatically a function of hegemonic power. It was, at the same time, means to resistance and base of a counter-hegemonic and conflictual ideology. The generally accepted view, however, assumes the paucity of large-scale collective action between the battle of Culloden and the major period of clearances meant that those who worked land and sea passively accepted their new lot with Gàidheal resistance not coming into full view until the 1880s, Napier and the blooming of ‘crofting community’. Orientated around events of land disturbance in the Highlands and Islands between 1914 and 1930, this paper aims to deepen, add to and partially challenge this monolithic narrative. In exploring inter-war protest events the paper will focus on the concept of dùthchas and indigenous worldviews albeit with the intention to caution against returning, yet again, to Hunter’s crofting community and there by perpetuating any over-reliance on singular over-arching explanation. Attention will be directed instead to the principles and insights of new protest studies. From there attention will turn to the idea of land and land disturbances as ‘heritage from below’. As with the previous theme there are multiple potential foci here. On, for instance, the ongoing series of memorials to land protests on the island of Lewi. Instead, it will be suggested that the legacy of these inter-war seizures is the community land buyout movement which has so radically transformed land ownership patterns in the Highlands and Islands and beyond and to the Scottish Government. Finally, the paper will return to a focus on conflicts over access to and use of land, albeit in the context of the century after 1746. Along with two colleagues I have recently begun a major research project which seeks to engage with the notion and chronology of ‘Highland resistance’. We contend that so narrow an understanding of responses to change and the hegemonic power of land power fails to fully engage with the ways it was experienced and resisted.

Bio: Iain Robertson is a historian by training but a historical geographer by inclination. Consequently, almost everything he does has land and landscape(s) either at or close to its heart; with a particular focus on the twentieth-century Highlands and Islands. He is Associate Professor of Historical Geography and the Centre for History, University of the Highlands and Islands, UK. Iain works at the intersection of critical heritage studies and the history of land issues in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. He has published widely on both foci, see, for instance, his monograph Landscapes of Protest in the Scottish Highlands after 1914 and the edited collection Heritage From Below. His work on land as protest is ongoing with the very recent award of a three-year Leverhulme Research Grant to apply his interpretation of twentieth century land disturbances – which have shaped the field of protest studies – to an earlier period.

- Hélène FOUHETY-LAFAYE (Professeur agrégée CPGE) – "Les représentations des paysages écossais comme outils de la mise en tourisme"

Abstract: Les représentations du paysages écossais ont façonné un imaginaire capable de nourrir un désir d’Écosse qui allie rudesse des contrées sauvages mais aussi confort des châteaux. La littérature, le cinéma, les séries mais aussi les supports publicitaires construisent un imaginaire qui mêlent réalités géographiques et fantasmes d'une territoires imprégnés d'histoire. Le paysage écossais ne peuvent rimer qu'avec grand air, crachin, landes, whisky et sons des cornemuses. Ce paysages fait appel à tous les sens (le bruit du vent ou l'odeur de la tourbes). Ils projettent le futur visiteur dans un espace lointain qui pourrait presque être associé à un espace insulaire. Au delà du mur d'Hadrien, frontière aujourd'hui seulement symbolique, c'est un bout du monde, un nord de l'Europe dans lequel les îles les plus septentrionales apparaissent encore plus comme des territoires des confins. Ces multiples représentations ont aboutit à la création d'archétypes que le touriste souhaite absolument retrouver quitte à s’affranchir de de la cohérence géographique. Les acteurs du tourisme depuis de nombreuses décennies n'hésitent pas à jouer, voire à abuser de ces clichés afin d'attirer une clientèle de plus en plus diversifiée mais surtout en quête d'un paysage écossais rêvé plus que vécu. La notion de paysage écossais est donc tout autant une réalité qu'une construction permettant l'affirmation d'une identité nationale mais aussi une mise en tourisme qui permette de se démarquer de l'Irlande ou de la Scandinavie. Le marketing de paysage devient ainsi, à travers toutes sortes de représentations, un outil d'affirmation d'une singularité territoriale

Bio: Hélène Fouhéty-Lafaye est professeure agrégée de géographie et enseignante en classes préparatoires aux grandes écoles. Ses thèmes de recherche sont la géographie des représentations et l'installation des Britanniques en France.