Joint Public & Islands Matter Seminar Now Confirmed - Resistance to Improvement in the Highlands and Islands, 1750-1820
Resistance to Improvement in the Highlands and Islands, 1750-1820' is a Leverhulme Trust funded project based at the Centre for History, in partnership with the University of Sussex, with Iain Robertson as PI and Juliette Desportes the RA.
This seminar will first briefly consider the routes both have taken to the project before introducing it. In the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising, those who worked land and sea became increasingly expected to bend to the will and objectives of economic improvement, confronting residents of landed estates with the rapid commodification and maximisation of their environment for profit.
'Resistance to improvement' explores the relationship between those who worked the land, and those who owned and managed it by investigating the methods, timings, and geographies of the resort to protest in the Scottish Highlands and Islands in the long eighteenth century, asking not only why people resisted changes to their environment and way of life, but where and how they did so. A year in, we will reflect on the project's ambitions and findings, offering initial thoughts on one of our case studies.
Bios
Dr Juliette Desportes research focuses on the ways Highland land has been managed, transformed, and contested across the long eighteenth-century. She is particularly interested in rural histories and geographies of protest and resistance and the politics of the ‘land question’ in Scotland in the early modern and modern periods.
Juliette is currently a Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘Resistance to Improvement in the Highlands and Islands, 1750-1820’ with Dr Iain Robertson (UHI) and Professor Carl Griffin (University of Sussex). The project investigates how rural workers in the Highlands sought to defend their livelihoods and ways of life in the age of radical ‘improvements’ which transformed the social and economic basis of Scottish agriculture.
Juliette completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2024. Her thesis explored the processes of land ‘improvement’ and the ways the Highland region was used as a site of experiment for socio-economic, cultural, social, and intellectual improvement by the British state and its agents. I took as a case study the Highland estates forcefully annexed by the Crown after the Jacobite rising of 1745 and managed by the Scottish legal and landowning elite until 1784. Juliette is currently writing her first monograph which will be based on her thesis and published with Edinburgh University Press as part of their 'Scotland’s Land' series edited by Professor Annie Tindley.
Juliette is particularly interested in how history and historians can serve a wider public and she is always keen to collaborate with communities and heritage organisations. In the past, Juliette has worked as a historical consultant in the private sector and she has a longstanding collaboration with the Urras Oighreachd Ghabhsainn in the Isle of Lewis as part of the Na Dorsan project.