Explore fascinating Scottish history by learning about the Highland clans and how clanship has changed across hundreds of years. Discover the important history of the Highland clans. The Highland, Gaelic speaking clans are a vital part of Scotland’s history. They also shape how the world imagines Scotland today.
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This course uses the expertise of University of Glasgow academics to explain the structure, economy and culture of the clans. It covers the centuries between the fall of the MacDonald Lords of the Isles in 1493 until around 1800, when the clans dissolved away as a result of social economic change. It then discusses how the legacies of clanship shaped global images of Scotland up until the present.
What topics will you cover?
- Week 1:Defining the Clans: Meet the chiefs and the clan gentry. See how different forms of family, kinship and strong links to land helped bind a clan together. Explore how archaeology and history can help explain the castles, churches, defensive sites, and overall function of the clans
- Week 2:Clan Society and Culture: Explore daily life for ordinary people living under the authority the chiefs. Why and how did clans feud, and what made the Scottish Crown seek to ‘civilise’ the Highlands? Learn about Gaelic musical culture, poetry and dress. Discover how clan involvement in the religious and civil wars of the seventeenth century was high profile and traumatic. Lastly, consider how new cultural and social-economic changes resulted in a slow decline of the clans as a form of community
- Week 3:Decline and Transformation: Assess the debates around clan involvement in the Jacobite risings between 1689 and 1746. Discover the latest thinking on the Battle of Culloden and the ‘Clearances’. Finally, appreciate how the literature of Walter Scott, the romantic poets, as well as Highland Games, theatre and film reinvented the clans as a romantic Scottish and global emblem.
What will you achieve?
By the end of the course, you'll be able to...
- Develop an understanding of the origins and functions of the Scottish Highland clans, and assess their social structures, economy and culture
- Investigate the contrast between hostile stereotypes of the clans as barbaric and warlike and their day-to-day role as complex social communities
- Reflect on the processes of feuding, civil war, revolt and social-economic change between 1500 and 1800 that resulted in the slow transformation and decline of the clans
- Explore how the clans were reinvented and romanticised in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through literature and poetry
- Identify and assess the modern legacies of the clans in events such as Highland Games, Clan Societies and Tartan Parades, as well as their portrayal in film and television
- Assess in an informed way the key charactertistics of Scottish Highland clanship, their history, their decline and their modern reinvention.
- Assess in an informed way the key charactertistics of Scottish Highland clanship, their history, their decline and their modern reinvention.
