Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Contributors
- Map of the British and Irish Isles
- Introduction
- Part I Power and its Constructions on Landed Estates
- Part II The Transnational Land Agent: Managing Land in the Four Nations and Beyond
- Part III Challenges and Catastrophe: The Land Agent under Fire
- Part IV Social Memory and the Land Agent
- 11 John Campbell (‘Am Baillidh Mor’), Chamberlain to the 7th and 8th Dukes of Argyll: Tradition and Social Memory
- 12 ‘Castle government’: The Psychologies of Land Management in Northern Scotland, c. 1830–90
- Postscript
- Index
12 - ‘Castle government’: The Psychologies of Land Management in Northern Scotland, c. 1830–90
from Part IV - Social Memory and the Land Agent
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 August 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Contributors
- Map of the British and Irish Isles
- Introduction
- Part I Power and its Constructions on Landed Estates
- Part II The Transnational Land Agent: Managing Land in the Four Nations and Beyond
- Part III Challenges and Catastrophe: The Land Agent under Fire
- Part IV Social Memory and the Land Agent
- 11 John Campbell (‘Am Baillidh Mor’), Chamberlain to the 7th and 8th Dukes of Argyll: Tradition and Social Memory
- 12 ‘Castle government’: The Psychologies of Land Management in Northern Scotland, c. 1830–90
- Postscript
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
Factors [land agents] find themselves placed in remote districts with enormous and almost absolute power over nearly every person there, and the more they exercise this power, the more the love of power increases, and impatience of all opposition increases; these men in these circumstances would be more than human if they did not sometimes commit excesses in the exercise of this power, and do things which it would be painful to bring to light, and which they can hardly see in their true colour unless set before the eyes of the public.
THIS DIAGNOSIS OF THE neuroses and monomania generated by nineteenth- century estate management was given to a Royal Commission, appointed to inquire into the conditions of the small tenants in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, when it heard evidence in the remote crofting township of Bettyhill, Sutherland in late 1883. It was given by a local Free Church minister, and represents a strikingly moral and yet empathetic description of the profession. We might note that the minister does not target any individual factor, but instead outlines the fundamental fractures and tensions in the nature of the profession; although, given the personality of the long-standing factor for the Sutherland estates in the north of the county, John Crawford, the minister could perhaps not be blamed for including some personal criticism as well.
The management of landed estates in an era of high paternalism, the professionalisation of land management and – in direct tension with these broad factors – sustained attack on landed privilege represented far more than any simple economic or asset management. It was a cultural and moral exercise and as such often generated more heat than light; it was a contentious, tangled operation with a significant attrition rate. This is perhaps unsurprising when we consider the scale of the power held by later nineteenth-century estate managers. The focus of this chapter is the Sutherland estates, the largest landed estate in western Europe in this period. The factors employed by the ducal family were in charge of territories as large as many counties – even countries or colonies – and as such, an examination of their methods, strengths, weaknesses and responses in a period of enormous change and challenge is instructive.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Land Agent , pp. 225 - 240Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018