The People of Glengarry: Highlanders in Transition, 1745-1820

David Schweitzer is a British and European history lecturer at the
University of Guelph.

This is a study of nine group emigrations from western Inverness to
Glengarry County in Upper Canada. It concentrates on the complex process
of agrarian and social change in Scotland, the experience of emigration,
and the broader and local patterns of the consequent settlement in
Canada. The first nine chapters examine the conditions in Scotland that
resulted in the emigration of Highlanders, and discuss the nature of the
various emigrant groups from the 1770s until after 1815. The process of
settlement is the topic of the following two chapters. These are
followed by a conclusion in which McLean pulls the various threads
together to emphasize how local Scottish life and culture shaped the
form of emigration and settlement in Canada.

This work challenges what has virtually come to be the standard
interpretation of the settlement of the Highlanders in Canada, as
established by J.M. Bumstead, Michael Flinn, and Eric Richards. Bumstead
is taken to task for underestimating the economic and social effects of
the clearances and for not looking closely enough at the community life
of the emigrants: that led him to misinterpret the motives behind the
emigration between 1770 and 1815. Flinn and Richards are given due
credit for their emphasis on the demographic crisis in the late
eighteenth century, but are criticized for not following through with an
investigation of the effects of the clearances on the clans’ fortunes.


It is suggested that new questions be asked about emigration, such as
“Were the clansmen pushed out of the old country or pulled by the
new?” The answer that they were pulled by the new seems to lie at the
heart of the analysis offered here. What makes the argument convincing
is the skillful, careful marshalling of evidence from a considerable
variety of sources in Canada and Scotland. The resulting picture is a
careful blend of broader perspective with close, detailed case studies
of individual clans and families, giving a comprehensive yet concise
explanation of the movement from the one land to the other. Any writer
of history knows that this is no mean feat, and in this book it all
comes together extraordinarily well.