The Highland Clearances have also been referred to as "the burnings". The main thrust was that people were thrown off their land to make way for  Cheviot sheep, a more profitable use of land - the French wars had raised the demand for meat with mutton being more profitable than beef. The then fashionable economics of Adam Smith ( a citizen of Kirkaldy like Gordon Brown) encouraged the motive for profit over kin. The Clan chiefs (although not all) and the assorted dukes and earls (most notoriously The Duke of Sutherland) had the backing of the church and the military - the Black Watch (recently based in Basra) and the Kings own Scottish Borderers amongst other Scottish regiments aided the flow of the populace to the slums of Glasgow or to the ships leaving from Greenock and Fort William for the colonies.

As Scots we love to blame the bastard English for our woes, and although the defeat of Jacobinism  had a bearing on the clearances, our own gentry, elite and institutions drove the substitution of sheep for people.

Anyway, that is all in the past, and now for the first time we have the Nationalists in power in Holyrood.  If they fuck up we can always escape to the sounds of Afro Celt Soundsystem...postmodern Scotland at its best!