Jacobitism_2 ; continued from here
In the months after the battle, the Hanoverian troops, led by Duke of Cumberland, (boo, hiss), went on a bloody rampage, slaughtering anyone suspected of being even remotely connected with the uprising, and confiscating land. He earned the nickname "the Butcher” for his efforts.
Wishing to stamp on the Scottish nation once and for all, laws were enacted disallowing certain expressions of Scottish culture. Two stand out in particular; the outlawing of the wearing of the kilt or any form of tartan, and the banning of the music of the bagpipes (although some may claim that the latter was for more humanitarian reasons - due to their awful din). In force for eight decades, these laws were specifically designed to destroy the Scottish Culture and make the people considerably less troublesome as a consequence.
At the end of this period, from the 1830’s onwards, insult was added to injury through the apparent resurrection and romanticisation of highland traditions by the likes of Sir Walter Scott, the Sobieski Brothers and finally Queen Victoria herself, that reduced a once proud culture to a shallow, regimented imitation. Many of the things seen today as “Scottish” spring from this relatively recent tradition, not the original.
The Highland Clearances
The Scottish nation may have withstood this onslaught, were it not for the fact that hot on its heels came the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions, and with them the Highland Clearances. These were carried out for financial gain by the new capitalists with no consideration for the human misery.
The Lairds abandoned their traditional roles as Tribal Chiefs and became Feudal-style Lords, taking control, of what has been communally owned land. Subsistence farming gave way to large scale agriculture, and country people were kicked off the land and replaced by sheep. Most of the Highlanders were either forced onto ships and taken to new British colonies in the Americas and the Caribbean or driven south to become cheap labour in the industrial cities of the lowlands or England. A generation later, as their conditions became steadily worse in the slums, many of these people followed their compatriots into exile and migrated “willingly” to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Their descendants brought the hollow Victorian remnants of their shattered culture and it is this that we see today in Aotearoa in the form of pipe bands, family tartans, Scottish dancing and Highland games. Five Sixths of all Scottish people now live outside of Scotland.