Turmoil among the Crofters: Evander McIver and the ‘Highland Question,’ 1873-1903

This article takes as its subject the later life and career of Evander McIver, estate manager or factor to successive dukes of Sutherland in the north-west of Sutherland for over fifty years. The dukes were amongst the richest landowners in Britain at that time, but they struggled with the damage inflicted on their reputation by the clearances of the early nineteenth century. It was the legacy of the clearances which partly informed the Crofters’ War of the 1880s, which shook McIver’s philosophical certainties and grip on management and estate ‘discipline’. The article traces McIver’s training, career and context, his dealings with the large crofter and cottar community and tensions with his employers before his retirement in 1895 and death in 1903. It is shown here he found it difficult to cope with changing attitudes to the crofters by the dukes and their administrators and rejected government intervention in crofting.