The Consolidation of the Crofting System
Gray, Malcolm
Agricultural History Review, Volume 5 part 1 (1957)
Abstract
One of the most notable results, perhaps, of local study has been to modify conceptions, long held, of a concerted advance, through the centuries and over Britain as a whole, towards a system of large farms, run by men of capital and manned by a numerically predominant wage-earning labour force; and of the progressive thinning of the rural population to fit the needs of efficient cultivation. Here and there have emerged discrepant areas–areas of a continuing small peasant system, of overpopulation, of mixing of occupations. And one of the tasks of agrarian history must be to disentangle the forces that have produced such oddity within the broad trend. Apart from Ireland, the best known of these areas is the Highlands of Scotland, where there persists, in the form of the crofting system, a society cast in the mould of the early eighteenth century. In this article I propose to discuss the reasons for the divergent agrarian development of the area.
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