Clearance or Death: The English Colonial State's Genocidal Campaign in Scotland After Culloden. Engaging with Liberation Scotland's Colonial Markers (Ref: SCM-CM1c)
Abstract. This study constitutes the third post engaging Liberation Scotland’s Colonial Marker 1: Military Threat, Occupation, and Subjugation, building directly upon the preceding research that established how Scotland’s incorporation under the colonial 1707 Treaty of Union, a de facto treaty of annexation of Scotland by the English colonial state, was militarily enforced through an infrastructural grid of 1,100 miles of strategic roads and over 650 garrison posts, representing the highest density of military occupation documented anywhere in the English Empire. Moving beyond the physical architecture of containment, this investigation interrogates the programmatic violence executed by the Hanoverian English colonial state against the indigenous population of the Gàidhealtachd (the Highlands) between 1746 and 1752, re-evaluating the colonial archive through the dual lenses of decolonial theory and international criminal jurisprudence. The historical record demonstrates that what followed the Battle of Culloden was not the uncontrolled aftermath of a conventional military engagement, but a centralized counter-insurgency doctrine executed across three distinct operational phases: wholesale summary executions under the Duke of Cumberland, targeted territorial terror under the Earl of Albemarle, and systemic scorched-earth incursions across defined districts designed to engineer civilian famine through the mass seizure of pastoral cattle, the burning of vital seed corn, and the destruction of the littoral fishing fleet. Simultaneously, the English colonial state pursued the physical eradication of the population's means of subsistence alongside the statutory abolition of its collective ontology. Through the Disarming and Dress Acts, the Heritable Jurisdictions Act, and the Annexing Acts, Westminster criminalized indigenous sartorial identity, commodified customary land tenure, privatized kin-based dispute resolution, and instituted aggressive linguistic assimilation. Confidential State Papers preserved at Kew reveal that English Crown officials drafted explicit statutory provisions to administratively erase ancestral clan surnames under pain of penal transportation and condition religious conscience upon mandatory prayers for a foreign monarch. This campaign of pacification was reinforced by weaponized sexual violence, deployed across the Western Highlands and Hebrides as an instrument of collective terror, which was left almost entirely without contemporary judicial record because an occupying martial regime operating under racialized contempt possessed no mechanism to receive the subaltern testimonies of monoglot Gaelic-speaking women. These coordinated measures satisfy every dimension of Raphael Lemkin’s classical 1944 sociological formulation of genocide, while fulfilling the demanding legal threshold of Article II(c) of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention through the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction in whole or in part. Although the Convention operates prospectively regarding individual criminal liability, the specific intent (dolus specialis) to clear or destroy the population is inscribed directly within the state’s own operational dispatches. Finally, this post traces how this documented reality was made unspeakable within public discourse through an integrated colonial apparatus of historiographical neutralization, academic terminological hedging, the subaltern co-optation of Highland survivors as imperial mercenaries, and the Victorian romantic overwrite, which depopulated an indigenous landscape only to resell it as imperial aesthetic scenery.
"The genocidal campaign in the aftermath of Culloden…" - National Trust for Scotland, custodian of the Culloden battlefield
The Hour, and the Years
The tactical engagement on Drummossie Moor took less than 60 minutes. On the sodden afternoon of 16 April 1746, an exhausted, functionally starved, administratively fractured Jacobite force of approximately 5,000 men; almost entirely Scots, flanked by the franco-scots of the Royal Écossais and a small detachment of Irish picquets; faced a fully provisioned Hanoverian army of nearly 9,000 regular troops under the command of Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. Having endured an abortive night march towards Nairn on empty rations, the Jacobite frontline was drawn up on flat, open, boggy moorland entirely unsuited to traditional shock-tactics and optimized for royal coehorn mortars and three-pounder field guns firing grapeshot and canister at point-blank range. Within three-quarters of an hour, roughly 1,000 to 1,500 Jacobites were killed or fatally wounded in the tactical engagement on the moor itself. Government fatalities numbered barely fifty.
The battlefield collision of that single afternoon is emphatically not our primary subject. The historiographical collapse of the wider campaign into that 60 minute event is itself a familiar colonial technology of containment.
Battles produce casualties. Within the traditional grammar of inter-state conflict, open clashes belong to the recognized rubric of conventional war. Modern Scotland is actively encouraged by colonial institutions to mourn Culloden precisely because mourning a tragedy compressed into an isolated afternoon raises no structural questions regarding the legitimacy or the operational character of the state that conquered it. As Walter Benjamin warned in his critique of historicism, imperial, colonial historiography routinely reduces protracted structural domination to an episodic spectacle, inviting empathetic grief while foreclosing systemic political critique. By confining the destruction of Gaelic society and Scottish self-determination to the romantic melancholy of a solitary charge; with a doomed prince, a fatal bog, an honorable failure, an obsolete broadsword charging a modern bayonet, a starving primitive clan levy, a tragic autumn of a dying culture, the "tragic twilight of the Gael" and an inescapable submission to English (masked as “British”) progress; the colonial archive manufactures an artificial temporal boundary, declaring the historical event concluded the moment royal artillery ceased fire at two o'clock. In precisely the same manner, the modern English colonial state dangles the domesticated carrot of internal, permission-based "referendums"; confining sovereignty to a gifted domestic ballot within the English colonial metropolitan legal order; precisely to mask, “manage”, contain, and foreclose Scotland’s inalienable right to direct decolonisation and self-determination under international law.
This epistemic enclosure begins with the very naming of the landscape. What colonial cartography canonized as "Culloden Moor" was an anglicisation of the Scottish Gaelic Cùil Lodair, meaning the "marshy nook" or the "corner of the pool", known in Gaelic oral tradition as Blàr Chùil Lodair ("the battlefield of the marshy nook"). But to its inhabitants and contemporary dispatches, the physical high ground of the engagement was known as Drummossie Moor, derived from the Gaelic Druim Mòsach, meaning the "treacherous ridge" or "ridge of bogs". The English colonial state did not adopt the name out of deference to Gaelic geography; rather, the imperial designation "Culloden" was an administrative contrivance appropriated from the adjacent private estate of Culloden House, the seat of Duncan Forbes, Lord President of the Court of Session and the English Crown’s primary civilian manager in the north. The linguistic displacement of the battlefield's living topography by the proprietary title of a Crown loyalist’s estate was itself an early act of colonial renaming; co-opting an indigenous place-name, stripping it of its vernacular communal meaning, and cataloguing the conquered territory under the ledger of colonial or colonised property.
This temporal enclosure is reinforced by the persistent unionist myth that Culloden was essentially a domestic "civil war"; a fratricidal clash between Scots or a localized sectarian police action against a backward, archaic Highland perimeter. The hard demographic and military data compiled in Murray Pittock’s, Stuart Reid’s, and Tony Pollard’s military histories, alongside recent digital historiography from Angry Pict for example, decisively dismantles this revisionism. Over the course of the 1745-46 rising, more than 20,000 Scots passed through Jacobite field forces across the campaign. Set against the Highland fencible strength of roughly 30,000 men, the demographic baseline General George Wade had assessed two decades earlier, and against Scotland's total population of approximately 1.25 million, that represents a sustained regional mobilization without parallel in 18th century western Europe outside of general conscription.
This was not a fringe or localized rebellion, but a broad-based, collective uprising that achieved a peak frontline strength of 12,000 at the Battle of Falkirk Muir on 17 January 1746. Fought amidst a blinding winter gale and torrential rain, Falkirk was the largest armed engagement of the entire 1745-46 campaign, surpassing both Prestonpans and Culloden in scale. There, an 8,000-strong Jacobite battle line deployed on the high ground and absorbed a downhill charge by three regiments of veteran Hanoverian dragoons; breaking them with disciplined, close-range musket volleys before the right wing, anchored by the Atholl Brigade and Clan Donald fighting on foot under Lord George Murray, swept forward in an aggressive counter-attack. The Jacobites routed Lieutenant-General Henry Hawley’s equal-sized army in under 20 minutes, seized the government baggage train and ten pieces of artillery, inflicting casualties at an overwhelming ratio of roughly seven to one; with government losses exceeding 350 killed and missing against approximately 50 Jacobite dead (Reid, 2002); and sent Hawley’s broken regiments in headlong retreat back to Edinburgh. The regular infantry formations shattered at Falkirk constituted approximately 80% of the very battalions Cumberland would redeploy three months later at Drummossie Moor.
By contrast, a maximum of roughly 3,000 Scots took the field on the government side throughout the entire conflict, primarily within regular pre-existing “British” regiments rather than through voluntary domestic recruitment, alongside specific pro-Hanoverian clan militias such as the Argyll militia pursuing ancestral feuds. In reality, barely 1,600 Scots were present in Cumberland’s frontline ranks at Drummossie Moor, accounting for less than 20% of his force, an auxiliary ratio considerably lower than the proportion of colonized troops the English colonial state routinely deployed to enforce its will across Ireland, India, or the Caribbean. Indeed, the London government deployed twice as many foreign German mercenaries, with over 5,000 Hessian troops stationed across the Central Highlands, as there were Scots serving in Cumberland's army. To brand an international invasion anchored by regular English battalions, hired German mercenaries, and Royal Navy warships against a massive indigenous mobilization a "Scottish civil war" is simply and clearly an exercise in colonial gaslighting.
What the archive actually records is an entirely different operational reality; a systematic, multi-year punitive campaign prosecuted against an unarmed civilian population long after the opposing army had dispersed. Two structural characteristics define this campaign.
The first is its extended temporal duration, animated by an administrative circularity that manufactured the legal pretext for its own violence. Punitive operations did not conclude with the clearance of the battlefield. They intensified throughout the summer of 1746, escalated through 1747, and in their legislative, physical, and agrarian modes of dispossession, extended well into the following decade. Official situation reports, regimental cantonment returns, and Secretary at War outgoing letter-books preserved in the War Office archives at Kew (specifically the WO 4 series, containing the operational directives sent from London to commanders in the field) reveal that the enforcement of statutory disarmament from the summer of 1746 onward operated through a closed coercive circle. These state registers, which meticulously tracked troop deployments, arms seizures, garrison requisitions, forced civilian billeting quotas, and the carceral logistics of prisoner transfers and penal transportation across every district, document how colonial English Crown authority converted routine administrative procedures into engines of collective punishment. When regular army search parties entered the western glens, the inability or refusal of local inhabitants to deliver up weapons, whether because serviceable arms were essential for daily subsistence and pastoral pest control, or because antiquated weapons had already been surrendered, was immediately catalogued by military detachments as deliberate defiance. This administrative designation of defiance was then leveraged as lawful authorization for the extrajudicial burning of entire townships, the wholesale seizure and driving off of livestock herds, the deliberate destruction of food stores, grain reserves, and fishing boats, the summary execution or arbitrary detention of suspected resisters, and the forced expulsion of non-combatant families into the bare hills to starve, where their very flight was recorded as definitive proof of guilt.
The second defining characteristic is its target. The operations directed from Cumberland's headquarters at Fort Augustus, and sustained under his successor the Earl of Albemarle, were aimed not at an armed formation, but at defined geographic districts. Infantry columns and naval sloops were dispatched into Knoydart, Morar, Arisaig, Lochaber, Badenoch, and the Western Isles to execute the systematic destruction of human habitation, stored food supplies, standing grain, seed corn, livestock, and fishing craft. In the analytical terms of Mbembe’s Necropolitics, the Hanoverian colonial state operationalized sovereignty through the creation of death-worlds; spatial conditions where an entire indigenous population was subjected to circumstances calculated to bring about their physical elimination. This was neither an isolated excess nor an administrative aberration. It represented the inaugural deployment of an imperial doctrine of total societal removal, a playbook of manufactured displacement, demographic replacement, and strategic resource starvation that the Anglo-British military would replicate nine years later in the forced expulsion of the Acadians in Nova Scotia (Le Grand Dérangement of 1755), and sustain through two centuries of colonial pacification up to the forced depopulation of the Chagos Archipelago in the late 1960s. An army that engages an opposing military force on a battlefield is prosecuting a war. An army that wages logistical warfare against the civilian population, the agrarian food reserves, the domestic shelter, the communal livestock herds, and the maritime fishing subsistence of an entire territory for years after any opposing military formation has ceased to exist is deliberately dismantling a society.
This domestic pacification was foundational to the architecture of the English Empire itself. In 1769, the traveler Thomas Pennant openly rationalized the terror in terms of a classic imperial felix culpa, demanding that "a veil be flung over a few excesses consequential of a day productive of so much benefit to the united kingdoms." What Pennant acknowledged was that the physical subjugation of Scotland unlocked the global expansion of the English colonial state. The military footprint required to maintain this conquest was staggering. Between 1749 and 1755, the English Crown maintained more regular army battalions in occupied Scotland than in the whole of the American colonies combined (Henshaw, 2014, pp. 124-138; Shy, 1965, pp. 35-44). The personnel of this domestic occupation moved seamlessly from the Scottish killing fields into the wider colonial world. Naval surveyors like James Cook, who honed his trade directly within the architecture of domestic occupation, patrolling the repressed Scottish coastline aboard the 20-gun sixth-rate Solebay in 1757, carried these precise technologies of hydrographic mapping, coastal surveillance, and territorial seizure straight into the Pacific. When Cook, commanding HMS Resolution, encountered the indigenous archipelago of Kanaky in 1774, his act of christening it "New Caledonia" was neither poetic nostalgia nor an innocent homage to his Scottish parentage. It was an explicit assertion of imperial mastery; imposing the Latinate moniker of a conquered and subjugated Scotland onto an unceded Pacific territory. By stamping the name of an annexed European nation onto Kanak lands, the English imperial project enacted a layered colonial violence; simultaneously erasing the sovereignty and indigenous toponymy of Kanaky while brandishing the complete subjugation of Scotland as an imperial trophy, subsumed into the global ledger of English maritime conquest. The cartographic erasure of Kanaky thus directly mirrored and extended the toponymic violence that had rewritten Blàr Chùil Lodair and Drummossie Moor into the property registers of the English Crown.
Phase One: Wholesale Slaughter
The immediate campaign of extermination was directed on the ground by Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, third son of George II, 25 years of age at Culloden, and vested with absolute executive discretion by the colonial English Crown. The violent duality of his historical persona encapsulates the moral schism of the colonial project; hailed in the coloniser’s capital London and the English shires as "Sweet William", fêted with Handel’s triumphal oratorios (Judas Maccabaeus), voted a monumental parliamentary annuity of £25,000, celebrated in domestic botanical naming; he was branded by the surviving indigenous population as "The Butcher of the Scots" (Am Búistear). In Scotland, this collective memory was so visceral that the vernacular folk taxonomy inverted the colonial floral tribute, naming the toxic, invasive ragwort Stinking Billy in his memory. To colonial England, he was the savior of Protestant commerce and Hanoverian order; to the subjugated, colonised nation, he was an unapologetic genocider who institutionalized the annihilation of a people. Indeed, as Murray Pittock notes, the epithet "The Butcher" was not a retrospective nationalist invention, but an immediate contemporary indictment. By May 1746, satirical reports circulated in London that Cumberland was to be made a freeman of the Butchers' Company, an occupation then synonymous with repulsive urban filth, moral degradation, and brutalizing violence. What unfolded under his direct command in the hours and days immediately following the collapse of the Jacobite frontline was not the collateral excess of an undisciplined army, but an organized, top-down programme of exterminatory violence that was cloaked from its inception in deliberate disinformation and colonial propaganda.
The tactical engagement itself claimed the initial 1,000 to 1,500 combatants killed in the fighting lines. Yet, as Murray Pittock establishes in his forensic analysis of the battlefield and its immediate wake, Drummossie Moor at its true scale was merely the epicenter of an explosion of state violence that radiated far beyond its perimeter. Drawing together the contemporary cartography of the Jacobite artillery officer and engineer John Finlayson with that of Thomas Sandby, the Duke of Cumberland’s official military draughtsman and private artist, who accompanied the royal army on campaign and produced eyewitness survey sketches of the deployment, Pittock and Christopher Duffy have demonstrated that the historical battlefield footprint vastly exceeded the 70 hectares currently curated by the National Trust for Scotland. The armies deployed across an expansive front. The “British” line extended for roughly 1,200 metres, while the Jacobite front stretched 1,100 metres; drawn up four deep with its left flank extending into the grounds of Culloden House and its entire second line and command post positioned well outside the modern tourist enclosure.
Deploying four ranks deep across an 1,100-metre frontage directly refutes the enduring colonial trope of an amorphous, undisciplined tribal mob. This was a conventional European infantry formation adhering to formal Franco-Scottish linear drill and professional staff work, capable of delivering coordinated volley fire before advancing in close tactical order.
Within the first 48 hours from dawn on 16 April, the casualty count more than doubled across a killing corridor stretching from Strathnairn through the 4 miles of road leading directly into Inverness; sweeping deep into the surrounding parishes. Murray Pittock’s spatial reconstruction of the wider killing corridor establishes that the total dead within the first forty-eight hours; encompassing the battlefield, the cavalry pursuit along the road to Inverness, and the deliberate search-and-kill sweeps across surrounding parishes; approached 3,000. Of this aggregate, probably no more than a third fell in actual tactical combat. The remaining 2,000 victims; a vast proportion of them unarmed non-combatants, local tenant cottars, women, youths, and spectators who had walked out toward Drummossie Moor simply to gather news; were systematically slaughtered in a rolling, extrajudicial purge executed by the British state apparatus.
The systematic slaughter of wounded men on and around the field is recorded in granular detail across contemporary eyewitness depositions preserved in the National Library of Scotland; most comprehensively within Bishop Robert Forbes’s monumental compendium The Lyon in Mourning; and mirrored in the chillingly bureaucratic War Office operational correspondence (WO 4 and SP 54) preserved at Kew. This was not the chaotic bloodlust of battle, but a policy driven by pre-meditated racial, Scotophobic contempt. Already in February 1746 at Perth, Cumberland had written of the need for the "Speedy Punishment of these Wretches"; an instructive lexical convergence with Frantz Fanon’s foundational diagnosis of the colonised in Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), capturing how imperial power consistently dehumanises indigenous populations as wretched, disposable anomalies marked for administrative purging; observing that they were too numerous for the civil courts to process. Writing from Aberdeen days later, he recommended summary death for anyone bearing an offensive weapon, noting the intractable "Disaffection to any Government established upon an English Foot." In English Crown correspondence, the indigenous population was routinely categorized in verminous terms, with John Campbell writing directly to the Earl of Glenorchy describing the Jacobites as mere "Vermine" to be eradicated. James Maxwell of Kirkconnel, an eyewitness cavalry officer, observed that exceedingly few were made prisoners on a field presenting a scene of horror and inhumanity rarely matched among what 18th century European elites termed "civilized nations", a contemporary bourgeois moral register that, while complicit in Europe's own global racial hierarchies, nevertheless underscored that English Crown forces were violating even the recognized continental laws of warfare (jus in bello) they sanctimoniously claimed to uphold; while the Chevalier de Johnstone recorded that Cumberland left the wounded exposed on the freezing moor for days before sending out organized death squads to finish off the survivors where they lay.
The results of this doctrine were immediately evident on the moor. Out of the meager prisoners taken, three-fifths were French regulars who could claim the protection of European cartel conventions. Only 154 Scottish prisoners were taken alive from the regiments. Of those, virtually none were wounded. The wounded were executed where they lay. On 17 April, the formal Orders of the Day dispatched an officer and fifty regular soldiers round every habitation and cottage neighbouring the battlefield with what amounted to an explicit "licence to kill". Robert Chambers and primary family archives catalogue the mechanical precision of these murders. 70 wounded prisoners were executed by firing squad the following morning. 19 officers were stripped, lined up against a wall, and shot or clubbed to death together while 32 men were barricaded inside a building and burned alive (an atrocity corroborated in its essentials by Ker of Graden, an aide-de-camp to Prince Charles Edward and senior staff officer in the Jacobite army who conducted intelligence and reconnaissance operations throughout the campaign). Primary evidence preserved in the Thriepland Papers in the Perth and Kinross Archives (MS T69/7/3/32) identifies several of the officers consumed in these flames, including Colonel O'Reilly, Major David Stewart of Kynachan of the Atholl Brigade, and two officers of the name of Rattray, alongside Mercer of Aldie butchered on the open field.
Among the most documented surviving testimonies of this coordinated liquidation was that of John Fraser, an officer in Lord Lovat’s regiment. Having been wounded on the field, Fraser was loaded onto a cart and taken to a site of mass execution; then subjected to volley fire at point-blank range of two to three metres. When the initial shots failed to kill him, soldiers clubbed him with musket butts, shattering his cheekbone and blinding him in one eye. A contemporary chronicler observed that Fraser's survival stood as a monument to a deliberate massacre executed with such cold-blooded cruelty that it would shame even those societies European colonial discourse routinely and hypocritically demeaned as "uncivilized"; an 18th century rhetorical indictment that weaponized the coloniser’s own racialized moral benchmarks to expose the utter barbarism of the colonial army itself. Maxwell of Kirkconnel affirmed that Cumberland’s greatest barbarities were committed directly under his eye, with the principal perpetrators receiving distinguishing marks of royal favor.
The violence then surged westward along the arterial corridors. When the Jacobite frontline fractured, Cumberland unleashed his cavalry; specifically Kingston’s Light Horse, reinforced on the Anglo-British right flank by the picquet of Cobham’s 10th Dragoons under Major-General Humphrey Bland; down the primary road into Inverness. As Pittock documents, Kingston’s and Cobham’s horsemen rode down the 4 mile corridor cutting down everyone in their path, entirely irrespective of age, gender, or whether they bore arms. Regular army officers writing from the field, including Lieutenant-Colonel James Wolfe (then serving as aide-de-camp to General Henry Hawley), openly confirmed that Bland’s cavalry gave no quarter, noting with clinical detachment that as few prisoners were taken as possible. Cottages flanking the road were torched with the wounded trapped inside. Those attempting to surrender were summarily bayoneted on the verge.
When Cumberland entered Inverness on the evening of 16 April, the streets, narrow residential closes, perimeter toll-ports, open wynds, and arterial approaches to the burgh were choked with the corpses of regular soldiers, tenant families, and local citizens alike. Rather than restraining his forces or restoring civil jurisdiction, the Hanoverian colonial commander commended his troops and established his operational headquarters in the town; issuing administrative orders that codified terror into standard military practice. The local jail, the Tolbooth, and requisitioned church buildings were rapidly converted into carceral holding pens where hundreds of prisoners were stripped naked, denied food, medical care, and water, and subjected to calculated neglect that produced catastrophic mortality rates before any formal legal apparatus could be convened.
Amphibious expeditionary detachments, operating in direct coordination with the English Royal Navy along the western seaboard and the Inner and Outer Hebrides, were dispatched into the glens under standing instructions that collapsed every operational distinction between active combatants and the indigenous Scottish population. The National Trust for Scotland, the institutional custodian of the battlefield, states unequivocally in its official pedagogical material that these were "indiscriminate reprisals of government forces, perpetrated against the clans in the months following the defeat", explicitly identifying a defining "ethnic dimension" to the colonial violence.
That assessment demands rigorous theoretical interrogation. When the official custodian of a contested site concedes that state reprisals were ethnic in character, it acknowledges that violence was targeted against a people as a people, rather than against political belligerents in a dynastic rising. In the conceptual framework of contemporary decolonial and genocide studies; from Patrick Wolfe’s foundational paradigm of the settler-colonial logic of elimination to A. Dirk Moses’s critique of absolute state security imperatives; Culloden and its immediate aftermath represent a quintessential campaign of state-directed societal erasure. The Hanoverian colonial state did not merely seek the military defeat of an opposing army; it enacted the physical and ontological liquidation of an indigenous Gaelic socio-political order (Gàidhealtachd) that stood as an intolerable impediment to the totalized, homogenizing sovereignty of the English colonial-imperial-commercial-mercantile project. By framing the Highland clans as racialized, semi-barbaric "internal enemies" existing outside the civilized laws of war, the English colonial state legitimized practices of collective punishment, mass dispossession, ethnic cleansing and territorial pacification that would subsequently serve as the operational laboratory for English colonial expansion across North America, Ireland, South Asia, and the Antipodes.
Historiographically, orthodox English colonial state apologetics have long sought to balance or rationalize this barbarism by exhuming the infamous "no quarter" order; a contested manuscript allegedly written by Lord George Murray commanding the Jacobite army to give no quarter to government troops. This text must be rejected for what it is; a post-hoc, state-manufactured forgery. Contemporary critical scholarship, led by Murray Pittock and archaeological syntheses by Tony Pollard and Christopher Duffy, has thoroughly exposed the fraudulent provenance of this document. It was printed and weaponized by English Crown propagandists in government gazettes in the immediate wake of the battle precisely to manufacture retrospective legal cover for flagrant violations of the contemporary jus in bello committed by royal English troops.
The evidentiary reality of the post-Culloden massacres does not require, nor should it ever accept, the dubious authority of a colonial disinformation tract. The realities of mass summary execution, coordinated famine, and racialized violence are irrefutably grounded in the English Crown’s own administrative registers, Cumberland’s unvarnished operational despatches, the material forensic archaeology of mass casualty trenches and mortar detonations across Drummossie Moor, and the living memory of a surviving colonized people. The record of colonial terror is written in the state's own archive and requires no contested slip of paper to substantiate its guilt. Any historiographical framework that hinges upon such forgeries merely reproduces the epistemic violence of the coloniser.
Phase Two: Selective Terror and the Architecture of Permanent Occupation
Cumberland departed Scotland on 18 July 1746, leaving military command vested in Lieutenant-General William Anne Keppel, second Earl of Albemarle. His departure marked no cessation of violence; rather, it signaled a rationalized transition in counter-insurgency doctrine. The indiscriminate kinetic slaughter of the battlefield gave way to a necropolitical regime (Mbembe); the calibrated subjugation of life to the power of death, enforced through systemic spatial containment, legal exceptionalism, and targeted physical terror. As Moses argues in The Problems of Genocide, state-directed mass violence is rarely an irrational explosion of bloodlust. It operates as an instrument of "permanent security", wherein an imperial center seeks to surgically excise an ontological threat to its political hegemony. Under Albemarle, this structural ambition transformed Scotland; systematically reduced in the assimilatory, cartographic doublespeak of the colonial metropole to the provincial status of "North Britain"; into an occupied zone, transitioning from acute punitive expedition to chronic carceral administration.
The operational terrain was reorganized with bureaucratic precision. Albemarle divided Scotland into four distinct military districts (North, North-East, South-Central, and Stirling/South) enforcing cordons across the Grampians and along the Great Glen to throttle civilian movement, sever Clan communication networks, interdict clandestine trade and coastal smuggling, enforce coercive disarmament sweeps, requisition agricultural produce, and hunt remaining combatants. Far from being a demobilized theater, the sheer volume of armed force deployed against the civilian population was unprecedented in modern British history. Between 1749 and 1755, the English Crown garrisoned more regular army battalions in Scotland than across the entirety of its North American colonial possessions combined (Shy, 1965, pp. 35-44; Henshaw, 2014, pp. 162-165). According to the official Cantonment Registers and Situation Reports of the colonial British Army, whose systematic transcription from National Records of Scotland and National Library of Scotland collections (notably NLS MS 17505) by David Kennedy and the Stennis Historical Society was comprehensively demonstrated in post SCM-CM1b as part of Colonial Marker 1 (The Garrison State the English Colonial State Built in Scotland), documenting an apparatus expanding to over 650 discrete army posts, forward pickets, and temporary billets from Orkney to the Borders, alongside the more conservative baseline of over 400 formal garrisons cited in academic historiography; over 12,000 regular troops occupied the country well into the 1750s.
In the autumn of 1746 alone, nearly 20 infantry battalions and 5 dragoon regiments were stationed across 71 separate Scottish towns, fishing burghs, and highland passes; as recorded in Albemarle's official distribution returns (Albemarle Papers, Vol. 1, pp. 28-34; Henshaw, 2014, pp. 88-92). Cumberland and Albemarle mandated a deliberate policy of rotating these garrisons every three months; specifically to prohibit fraternization and to maintain the subject population under the perpetual, disciplinary spectacle of military "Awe".
The physical infrastructure of this subjugation, with General George Wade’s military highways, the expanded garrison forts (Fort George, Fort Augustus, Fort William), and hundreds of decentralized cantonments and outposts, did not constitute a neutral administrative backdrop. They operated as the coercive panopticon through which selective terror functioned. In Foucault’s analytical terms, this was the spatial discipline of an entire people. Garrisons did not merely police space, they manufactured an ecology of terror. At Fort Augustus, General Humphrey Bland; whose own 1743 Treatise of Military Discipline had hypocritically advocated a "respectful attitude... towards the civilian population"; directed operations to lay waste to surrounding settlements, subsequently counseling the Duke of Newcastle on the administrative necessity of being "ridd of all Chiefs of Clans" and cleansing the "Barbarous Language" of the Highlands to clear the ground for Anglophone colonization. Major-General John Campbell and Captain John Fergusson of the 14-gun bomb vessel HMS Furnace systematically laid Sunart, Morvern, and the Inner Hebrides waste, burning settlements, executing suspects, and confiscating cattle so that famine would finish what canister shot had begun. The surrender of arms afforded no protection. In June 1746, Captain Caroline Scott executed prisoners at Fort William who had laid down their arms under promised immunity, deliberately drowning them beneath salmon nets in the River Lochy (Forbes, The Lyon in Mourning, Vol. 1, pp. 310-312; Vol. 2, p. 289).
This sustained carceral violence was accompanied by state-sanctioned schemes of demographic purging. In official War Office and State Paper correspondence throughout the spring and summer of 1746 (SP 54/32), Cumberland repeatedly petitioned the Westminster Parliament to enact mass deportations, declaring in operational dispatches that 'this Generation must be pretty well worn out, before this Country will be quiet' (TNA SP 54/32/17, Cumberland to Newcastle, 28 June 1746) and explicitly urging the forced transportation of entire clans; singling out the Camerons and MacDonalds under pain of outlawry; to the lethal plantation environments of the West Indies. While the English Parliament avoided the administrative liabilities of wholesale clan banishment, the military state weaponized the penal apparatus to achieve identical outcomes. More than 3,400 documented prisoners were captured and stripped of their legal rights under Scots law, transferred to English jurisdictions to face summary trial by hostile colonial juries. On the pestilential prison hulks moored at Tilbury on the Thames, prisoners endured catastrophic conditions resulting in mortality rates approaching 70% (Seton and Arnot, 1928, Vol. 1, pp. 216-234). Nearly 1,000 men and women; including female combatants and civilian support networks like Isabel Chalmers, Anne Cameron, and Flora Cameron (Seton and Arnot, 1928, Vol. 2, pp. 64-89); were shipped as bonded laborers to plantation servitude in English colonies like Jamaica, Maryland, and Virginia. Hundreds more who were ostensibly "pardoned" were forcibly coerced into imperial regiments bound for disease-ridden Caribbean deployments, an early realization of the cold imperial calculus long attributed to James Wolfe in his correspondence regarding Highland recruits: 'no great mischief if they fall' (Letter to Captain William Rickson, 9 June 1751).
This laboratory of counter-insurgency directly prefigured the repressive mechanisms the English colonial state would deploy across its expanding colonial empire. The methods refined in the Highlands between 1746 and 1755 (collective punishment, agricultural destruction, livestock expropriation, the creation of cordon networks, extrajudicial execution, linguicide, genocide, and the forced expulsion of disaffected populations or ethnic cleansing) migrated directly to North America. Less than a decade later, during Le Grand Dérangement of 1755, English Crown forces under the command of Scottish colonial officers like John Campbell, Lord Loudoun, deployed these identical techniques to forcibly expel the great majority of the French Acadian population from Nova Scotia, with Cumberland explicitly writing in his military correspondence that he looked forward to the Acadians being 'drove out' just as he had ordered in the Scottish western Highlands (Royal Archives, Cumberland Papers, Box 45/218; cited in Plank, 2001, pp. 142-144).
This operational continuity completely dismantles and reverses the foundational propaganda discourse of the English colonial state; the enduring unionist colonial myth that Scotland was an autonomous, equal partner eagerly "participating" in the Anglo-British imperial enterprise. Far from disproving colonization, the co-optation and recruitment of subjugated Scots into the coercive machinery of the global colonial English Army illustrates the universal playbook of imperial conquest. Every colonizing power systematically drafts the subaltern, defeated population into service as colonial collaborators and military shock troops. Indigenous bodies, their domestic autonomy extinguished and their subsistence ruined by agrarian destruction and clearance, are coerced into policing the frontier of new conquests; a classic dynamic of outsourced imperial violence where colonized subjects are deployed as the foot soldiers of the colonial metropole to enact upon others the very subjugation visited upon themselves.
In terms of both tactical doctrine and administrative personnel, the Hanoverian pacification of the Scottish Highlands constituted the foundational template for imperial counter-insurgency throughout the modern world.
The Personnel Are the Proof: From Lochaber to Mi'kma'ki
The continuity between the Highland pacification and the wider imperial project is not merely doctrinal or abstract. It was carried across oceans in the persons and careers of named military officers. One administrative trajectory establishes this continuity beyond dispute.
In the summer of 1746, Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Cornwallis commanded punitive detachments of the 20th Regiment of Foot across Lochaber and the surrounding glens, burning civilian townships, destroying fishing craft, and driving off cattle herds under Cumberland’s explicit orders to lay waste to non-compliant districts. In 1749, Cornwallis was appointed Governor of Nova Scotia and oversaw the establishment of the fortified English colonial settlement at Halifax. In October of that year, scarcely 39 months after executing the scorched-earth campaign in Lochaber, Cornwallis and his Council issued the notorious Scalping Proclamation, offering a state bounty for every scalp taken from the indigenous Mi'kmaq population, encompassing men, women, and children.
The officer who executed the systematic destruction of Gaelic agrarian communities in the Scottish Highlands required no ideological retraining when tasked with the physical subjugation of indigenous nations in Atlantic North America. The methods (collective targeting, the criminalization of native subsistence, and extrajudicial civilian bounties) formed a singular counter-insurgency doctrine. The Gàidhealtachd was the training ground where the apparatus was refined.
In 2018, following years of sustained protest and organizing by Mi'kmaq leadership and communities, the Halifax Regional Municipality removed the public bronze statue of Edward Cornwallis from its downtown park, and in 2020 an expert advisory committee recommended the systematic stripping of his name from civic infrastructure and public assets across the city.
Yet, there is no marker anywhere in Lochaber recording what he did there first.
Phase Three: The Destruction of the Means of Life and the Mechanics of Manufactured Starvation
The third phase of the Hanoverian pacification represents the structural core of the entire counter-insurgency apparatus. As Allan I. Macinnes formulates without historiographical euphemism, state operations pivoted towards the engineered starvation of targeted districts through the premeditated destruction of standing crops, pastoral herds, personal property, and domestic shelter, prosecuted with the explicit strategic imperative to effect either total demographic clearance or biological death.
This was neither an emotional overreach by frontline commanders nor the lawful forfeiture of rebel estates. It constituted what Raphael Lemkin identified in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe as the physical and economic techniques of genocide with the synchronized destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national or regional groups, engineered to bring about their inevitable destruction. In modern international jurisprudence, this weaponization of starvation against a civilian collective directly violates the principles codified in Article II(c) of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. The English Crown did not target treasonous individuals but marked an entire socio-cultural ecology for liquidation.
The material mechanics of this campaign operated across five interdependent systems of subsistence:
- The Liquidation of Pastoral Capital (Cattle): Tens of thousands of black cattle were rounded up by military driving parties under commanders like Major-General John Campbell and Captain Caroline Scott, concentrated at Fort Augustus, and driven south for commercial auction in English and Lowland markets. In an indigenous Gàidhealtachd economy structured upon pastoral transhumance, cattle were not mere commodities. They functioned as the community's primary store of capital, currency, credit, dowry, and winter protein. Stripping a clan territory of its herds removed the circulating wealth and nutritional basis of the society overnight. This systematic expropriation directly mirrored the pastoral liquidation doctrine pioneered by the Tudor and Cromwellian armies in Gaelic Ireland; where commanders like Carew, Mountjoy, and Chichester recognized that seizing the indigenous creaghts (mobile cattle herds) was the swiftest method to dismantle clan autonomy, induce artificial famine, and collapse pastoral resistance. At Fort Augustus, Cumberland’s officers operated as the direct heirs of this cross-Irish colonial laboratory.
- The Annihilation of the Bio-Temporal Cycle (Grain and Seed Corn): British infantry systematically torched meal-girnels, barn stores, and standing barley and oats, deliberately destroying the precious seed corn alongside immediate subsistence reserves. As Fanon observed regarding colonial conquests in North Africa, the destruction of food systems targets the biological temporality of the native; destroying seed corn eradicates not merely the immediate season’s caloric intake, but cancels the agricultural cycle for years to come, ensuring intergenerational famine.
- The Weaponization of Climate (Arson and Shelter Destruction): Detachments led by Brigadier Mordaunt, Lord George Sackville, and the aforementioned Colonel Edward Cornwallis, whose operations across Lochaber directly preceded his governorship and anti-indigenous bounty decrees in Nova Scotia, systematically burnt thousands of dwellings, sheilings, and winter byres across Knoydart, Morar, Appin, and Lochaber. In a sub-arctic maritime climate characterized by extreme Atlantic rainfall and severe winter frosts, shelter is the direct barrier against hypothermic death. Evicting families into open mountainsides while setting fire to their thatch and roof-timbers converted the environment itself into a weapon of war.
- The Maritime Cordon (Sinking and Smashing Boats): Along the rugged western littoral, sea lochs, and Hebridean islands, Royal Navy vessels, most notably HMS Furnace and HMS Terror, confiscated or smashed every sea-going galley (birlinn), inshore fishing currach, ferry skiff, transport coble, and yawl. In an archipelago economy devoid of overland roads, a boat represented oceanic foraging, coastal trade, community communication, and medical mobility. Destroying all maritime craft sealed a starving population within an environmentally stripped inland perimeter, transforming the Western Highlands into an open-air prison camp where escape was impossible.
- Ecological Ruin and Induced Epidemic: Confiscating herds and burning settlements shattered the delicate ecological equilibrium of the glens. Deprived of dairy and grain, surviving populations were driven to forage wild stinging nettles (deanntag), foreshore shellfish (limpets and whelks), edible dulse seaweed (duileasg), wild sorrel, and forage pasture weeds, resulting in acute malnutrition that triggered widespread outbreaks of typhus, dysentery, and scurvy across the northern shires.
The enduring devastation of this manufactured collapse is preserved directly in the archival record. Primary eyewitness memoranda preserved in the National Library of Scotland, such as Notes on Calamities in Atholl (NLS MS 17504, fol. 43), document communities reduced to living skeletons and dying of chronic starvation as late as 1752, six years after Culloden and four years after the formal cessation of major military sweeps. A population systematically stripped of its livestock, its current food supply, its agricultural seed, its shelter, and its fishing vessels on the eve of a Highland winter was not being subjected to punitive police action or legal discipline. In the vocabulary of modern decolonial theory and international law, it was being systematically subjected to manufactured famine and targeted demographic liquidation.
The Legal Campaign: Epistemicide, Juridical Annexation, Linguistic Decimation, Agrarian Expropriation, and Ontological Erasure
The kinetic operations of the English colonial state military did not run parallel to the post-Culloden legislative agenda as separate initiatives. They operated as the dual prongs of a unified colonial enterprise. Paternalistic interpretations; such as the National Trust for Scotland’s characterization of the era as a drive to "eradicate all cultural vestiges of clanship by civilising... the Gaels into serviceable, industrial and dutiful subjects of the House of Hanover"; masks what we have often evoked and is theorized as epistemicide and the coloniality of being (Boaventura de Sousa Santos; Mignolo); the systematic destruction of indigenous knowledge systems, customary law, and communal ontology to reduce a self-determining society into compliant labour reserves for the metropole. This civilizing discourse is the standard ideological alibi of European colonial expansion. The statutory assault drafted at Westminster between 1746 and 1752 was an organic extension of colonial precedents; specifically the 1609 Statutes of Iona and the Scottish Privy Council’s 1616 School Act criminalizing the "vulgar and barbarous" Gaelic tongue; later mirrored by the English East India Company in Bengal, English Crown authorities at the Cape, or English colonial state administrators across colonial Kenya to dissolve communal social structures.
The statutory offensive methodically dismantled the material, legal, socio-economic and territorial underpinnings of Gaelic life through several interlocking statutory mechanisms.
The Act of Proscription 1746 (19 Geo. II, c. 39), extending far beyond general disarmament, criminalized the sartorial fabric of an entire civilization. Wearing the fèileadh mòr (great plaid), breacan (tartan), short hose, or shoulder belts was classified as an offense against state security, penalizing a first infraction with six months of solitary confinement and a second with mandatory seven years' transportation to the Atlantic plantations.
This was reinforced by the Heritable Jurisdictions Act 1747 (20 Geo. II, c. 43), which extinguished hereditary regalities, baronies, and clan bailieries. Customary dispute resolution rooted in communal kin arbitration was forcibly replaced by centralized Westminster circuit courts; by paying out the judicially calculated sum of £152,037 in statutory cash compensation to Scottish proprietors (The Scots Magazine, Vol. 10, April 1748), the English Crown converted hereditary patriarchal leaders into commercial, rent-seeking landlords.
Simultaneously, the Vesting Act 1747 (20 Geo. II, c. 41) and the Annexing Act 1752 (25 Geo. II, c. 41) expropriated 41 major estates, establishing the Commissioners for the Forfeited Annexed Estates to transform the Highlands into an experimental laboratory. Agrarian runrig systems were broken into individual commercial tenancies, English-language schooling was aggressively financed via the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) to stamp out Gaelic speech, while land was leased exclusively to individuals swearing unconditional oaths of loyalty to the Hanoverian English Crown.
Beyond the enacted statutes, confidential archival records prove that the colonial center contemplated an even more radical program of demographic and cultural eradication. In a high-level policy memorandum preserved in The National Archives at Kew, titled Sketch of regulations proposed to be made in Scotland, 1746 (TNA SP 54/32/24), English Crown officials drafted explicit proposals to legally extinguish ancestral surnames under pain of penal transportation:
"That a Bill be brought in for abolishing the Names of some of the Clans, most notoriously concerned in the Rebellion, viz, Cameron, Mac Pherson and [MacDonald]... in the like manner as the McGregors by the Statute Cha. 1. Part 1: Act 30. Not to call or write themselves by that Name, under Pain of Transportation..."
In an indigenous kinship system (clann), the patronymic is the fundamental technology of social reproduction, carrying reciprocal tenure, hereditary obligation, and collective memory. Effacing the surname was an administrative plan to legally terminate the existence of an identifiable people. Compounding this, the draft mandated the total suppression of unlicensed meeting houses and conventicles unless their ministers possessed certificates of loyalty and English episcopal ordination, conditioning religious conscience on mandatory prayers for an alien monarch whose coronation oath repudiated the constitutional sovereignty of the Scottish people and violated the fundamental, unalterable ecclesiastical protections codified in the 1706-1707 Treaty of Union; in reality a Treaty of Annexation.
Synthesizing the prohibition of indigenous material dress, the juridical eradication of customary law, the colonial restructuring of agrarian land, the targeted erasure of ancestral patronymics, and the policing of worship alongside the systematic destruction of the means of life reveals a unified structural logic. This was neither the routine suppression of civil unrest nor the policing of internal treason. Under the frameworks of international law and decolonial theory, it was a comprehensive program of systemic elimination, executed simultaneously against the physical body of a population and the metaphysical architecture of its identity.
What Was Done to Women. Gendered Subjugation: Weaponized Sexual Violence and Archival Silence with Genocidal Intent
Contemporary primary accounts of the post-Culloden pacification document systemic, widespread sexual violence perpetrated by English colonial state forces across the Highlands and Hebrides. Recorded consistently across independent testimonies, most notably compiled in Bishop Robert Forbes’s contemporary documentary register The Lyon in Mourning, these accounts describe brutal gang rapes, public violations, retaliatory assaults, the targeting of pregnant and nursing women, forced stripping, and opportunistic abductions at gunpoint carried out during garrison sweeps and naval incursions by commanders like Captain John Fergusson and Major-General John Campbell. Yet, these atrocities remain almost entirely absent from official judicial proceedings. This absence does not reflect historical non-occurrence. It simply exposes the structural mechanics of colonial archival production.
In her landmark study of sexual violence in long 18th century Scotland, Katie Barclay demonstrates the severe structural barriers that produced negligible prosecution rates even within peacetime civil society; extreme burdens of physical proof, the catastrophic social ruin of the complainant, a juridical framework that categorized rape through the lens of "disorderly passions" and lust rather than systemic bodily violence. When transposed onto the occupied Gàidhealtachd in 1746, these peacetime barriers were amplified by the absolute asymmetries of colonial martial law.
The victims were predominantly monoglot, Gaelic-speaking women inhabiting an active war zone while the perpetrators were armed regular soldiers and officers of an occupying imperial army operating under explicit orders of collective subjugation. The judicial machinery (military provosts, garrison court-martials, visiting circuit courts, partisan sheriffs-depute, civil magistrates) belonged entirely to the occupying English Hanoverian colonial state, which actively racialized the indigenous population as "savage" and traitorous.
Under these conditions, an absence of legal convictions is the precise outcome the colonial apparatus was engineered to produce. Archival silence is never neutral. It represents an active technology of erasure. This forms another structural occlusion as identified across this marker with the suppression of the 20,000 popular signatures against the colonial 1707 Treaty of Union; the historical concealment of over 650 military garrisons and cantonments; the erasure of the Irish pastoral precedents; and here, the institutional effacement of occupied women’s testimonies, the subaltern archive most systematically expunged in the history of colonial conquest.
Decolonial feminist theory and critical genocide studies reveal that sexual violence after Culloden was not an incidental byproduct of undisciplined soldiery. It operated as a deliberate technology of counter-insurgency. Wartime mass rape functions to terrorize a civilian collective and perform the absolute emasculation and subjugation of colonized men who cannot defend their communities; while physically penetrating the biological and cultural reproduction of an indigenous society (MacKinnon; Card). In a kin-based lineage system (clann), women are the physical bearers of life, the custodians of genealogical memory (sloinnteireachd), the primary sustainers of the domestic pastoral economy, and the generational transmitters of the indigenous language (a' Ghàidhlig). Assaulting women strikes directly at the ontological survival of the group.
This dynamic places the Hanoverian pacification squarely within the modern legal and conceptual architecture of genocide. While Article II(d) of the 1948 UN Convention explicitly identifies "measures intended to prevent births within the group" and "causing serious bodily or mental harm" as constituent acts of genocide, the jurisprudence of international tribunals; notably the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu, 1998) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (Prosecutor v. Anto Furundžija, 1998); has formally codified systemic sexual violence as an instrument of genocide when deployed to destroy, in whole or in part, the social cohesion and physical continuity of a targeted group.
The systemic reality of this violence was laid bare in 1995, when designer Alexander McQueen unveiled his controversial autumn/winter collection, Highland Rape, at London Fashion Week. Featuring models clad in shredded tartan, distressed lace, and slashed bodices staggering across a runway strewn with heather and deer antlers, the presentation provoked immediate colonial, metropolitan outrage, dismissed by Anglo-British fashion critics as misogynistic shock-theater or dark nationalism. McQueen, whose own family had been cleared from the Isle of Skye, firmly repudiated the colonial reading:
"The collection was about England's rape of Scotland... People thought it was about women being raped, yet Highland Rape was about Queen Victoria and the Highland Clearances."
McQueen was not deploying a poetic metaphor of conquest. He was staging an unvarnished confrontation with a suppressed historical material reality; the literal bodily violation of Highland women and the violent clearance of their people, executed by the English Crown and subsequently romanticized into imperial kitsch. By refusing the coloniser’s aesthetic amnesia, the presentation forced the historical trauma of colonial pacification back into the center of imperial culture.
The Genocide, Named: Lemkin’s Classical Formulation and the 1948 Convention. The Archival Proof of Intent
To move beyond the euphemistic vocabulary of "pacification", "quelling," or "civilizing", the historical characterization of the English Hanoverian colonial campaign must be anchored directly in the foundational jurisprudence of genocide studies. When Raphael Lemkin coined the neologism in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), he formulated an analytical definition designed precisely to capture composite, state-directed processes of group eradication:
"Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group... It signifies a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups."
Lemkin was explicit that genocide does not necessitate the instantaneous, physical mass murder of every member of a group. Rather, it denotes a synchronized, multi-pronged structural assault executed against the collective as an organic entity, disintegrating the institutional, cultural, and material architecture that enables that group to survive and reproduce itself as a distinct people.
When mapped systematically against the documented archival record of post-Culloden Scotland, every single dimension of Lemkin’s classical rubric is satisfied:
Political and Social Institutions: The juridical dismantling of hereditary arbitration and clan authority via the Heritable Jurisdictions Act 1747 (20 Geo. II, c. 43); the abolition of communal kinship obligations; and the forced commodification of customary land tenure.
Culture: The criminalization of indigenous sartorial identity under the Act of Proscription 1746 (19 Geo. II, c. 39), which penalized the wearing of the breacan or the plaid with mandatory seven-year penal transportation; alongside the legal classification of the Highland bagpipe (a’ phìob mhòr) as an offensive instrument of war, established in the capital conviction of James Reid.
Language: The multi-generational state campaign targeting a' Ghàidhlig, rooted in the 1609 Statutes of Iona and the 1616 School Act, institutionalized after 1746 through the aggressive linguistic assimilation programs of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) across the Forfeited Annexed Estates.
National Feelings: The state-level draft policy (TNA SP 54/32/24) mandating the absolute legislative abolition of core ancestral clan surnames under pain of banishment, designed to systematically efface genealogical lineage (sloinnteireachd) and collective memory.
Religion: The statutory suppression of non-juring Episcopalian meeting houses (19 Geo. II, c. 38) and the drafted mandates conditioning the freedom of worship upon explicit loyalty oaths to a foreign English Hanoverian king; a direct legislative violation of the unalterable ecclesiastical protections enshrined in the 1706-1707 Treaty of Union.
Economic Existence: The systematic destruction of the means of life through the mass seizure of pastoral herds, the torching of homes, the burning of grain stores and vital seed corn, and the crushing of marine craft, expressly coordinated across defined Highland districts.
This synchronization was neither incidental nor a chaotic military overreach; it was an integrated, coordinated program of state violence, visibly planned and executed across statutory enactments, Privy Council debates, and high-command military dispatches.
The Codified Legal Threshold: Article II(c) of the 1948 Convention
While the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide narrowed Lemkin’s broad sociological framework to a more stringent statutory standard, the post-Culloden campaign satisfies the highest bar of this modern codification. The critical limb engaged is Article II(c):
"Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."
As Antonio Cassese and William Schabas have underscored, Article II(c) was specifically drafted to encapsulate genocide through biological attrition and engineered material deprivation rather than direct kinetic execution; with the weaponization of famine, the denial of shelter, and the targeted liquidation of the means of subsistence. The historical record demonstrates that English Crown forces did not merely cause widespread devastation but intentionally deployed seasonal exposure and artificial starvation as deliberate mechanisms to force either demographic clearance or biological death.
To maintain absolute intellectual rigor and avoid rhetorical vulnerabilities, two legal qualifications must be stated with precision:
- Non-Retroactivity and Historical Characterization: Under the principle of nullum crimen sine lege, the 1948 Convention operates prospectively from its 1951 entry into force and cannot provide jurisdiction for retrospective legal prosecution. However, as international legal scholars and historians of empire universally recognize, the historical designation of an atrocity as genocide does not depend on the retroactive availability of a courtroom. The Herero and Namaqua genocide (1904-1908) committed by the German Empire in South West Africa preceded the Convention by four decades. An atrocity is not retrospectively decriminalized or stripped of its ontological reality by the historical date of its statutory codification. This distinction carries direct legal consequence today. In its July 2024 Advisory Opinion (Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory), the International Court of Justice explicitly affirmed that in contexts of prolonged territorial occupation and administrative annexation, the right to self-determination constitutes a peremptory norm (jus cogens) of general international law; a non-derogable right whose systemic suppression in 1746 cannot be cured by the passage of time or naturalized by three centuries of municipal statutes.
- The Archival Indication of Dolus Specialis (Specific Intent): In international criminal jurisprudence, proving specific intent (dolus specialis) is the most demanding evidentiary hurdle. Critics often seek to reduce the post-Culloden devastation to a byproduct of military excess or collateral damage. However, the archival dispatches from Cumberland, Albemarle, and their operational commanders preserve the mental element (mens rea) in plain ink. The destruction of food stores and homes was neither accidental nor ancillary. It was pursued with the recorded, conscious intent to render the target region uninhabitable for its indigenous inhabitants. The objective was explicitly stated: total territorial depopulation and societal collapse. The specific intent required by international law is inscribed directly within the state’s own archive.
Where This Sits in the Record: The Transnational Paradigm of Colonial Counter-Insurgency
The post-Culloden pacification of the Scottish Highlands was not an anomalous domestic episode, nor can it be quarantined within the insular framework of Anglo-British constitutional history. It is early, essential, foundational, and programmatic; the pioneering institutional laboratory for modern colonial pacification and population control. When situated within the comparative historiography of global imperial expansion, the methods deployed across the Gàidhealtachd between 1746 and 1752 reveal an operational architecture that recurred across the modern imperial project.
French Algeria (The Razzia and Enfumades, 1840s): Under Maréchal Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, the French colonial army institutionalized the razzia, systematic scorched-earth incursions targeting civilian means of survival, alongside the deliberate suffocation of civilian populations in the caves of Dahra (enfumades of 1845 under Pélissier and Saint-Arnaud). Bugeaud’s governing doctrine was explicit. Conquest was achieved not by engaging native combatants in set-piece battles, but by cutting down grain harvests, burning olive orchards, driving off pastoral herds, and demolishing villages to collapse the material basis of subsistence. The logic was identical to Cumberland's operations in Lochaber and Knoydart 99 years earlier; liquidating the ecology of life compels either total capitulation, mass removal, or starvation.
German South West Africa (The Herero and Nama Genocide, 1904-1908): In August 1904, Imperial German colonial forces fought the decisive Battle of Waterberg, known in Otjiherero as the Battle of Ohamakari, against the Ovaherero people, who had risen in armed revolt against German land dispossession and colonial rule in what is modern-day Namibia. Rather than accepting surrender following the battle, the German commander, Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha, issued an explicit written extermination proclamation (Vernichtungsbefehl), declaring that every Herero found within German borders, with or without a gun or cattle, would be shot. Trotha’s forces established an armed military cordon that sealed off access to all regional waterholes and deliberately drove tens of thousands of fleeing Herero men, women, and children into the waterless, arid wastes of the Omaheke sandveld (part of the Kalahari desert) to perish of dehydration and exposure. Surviving Herero and Nama populations were subsequently rounded up and interned in forced-labor concentration camps (Konzentrationslager), most notoriously on Shark Island (Haifischinsel) off Lüderitz, where up to half of all prisoners died of starvation, forced labor, and disease. Their vast herds of cattle, the foundational store of wealth and subsistence in Herero pastoral society, were completely expropriated. Their traditional chieftaincies were legally dissolved. Formally recognized in modern genocide studies and international jurisprudence as the 20th century’s first state-directed genocide, the campaign replicated the identical mechanics of environmental weaponization, demographic containment, and pastoral liquidation previously executed across the Scottish Highlands.
British Kenya (The Mau Mau Emergency, 1952-1960): In October 1952, the English colonial government declared a state of emergency to suppress the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (widely designated by colonial authorities as the "Mau Mau"), an anti-colonial movement predominantly composed of the indigenous Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru peoples fighting to reclaim lands alienated for white European settlement. In response, Crown forces instituted a draconian matrix of counter-insurgency.
Over one million Kikuyu civilians were forcibly relocated into enclosed, barbed-wire strategic settlements under armed guard (compulsory villagization), severing the guerrilla movement from rural logistics. Tens of thousands of suspected insurgents and sympathizers were swept without trial into a tiered, carceral archipelago of detention camps known euphemistically as "the Pipeline", designed to break political resistance through hard labor and coerced psychological rehabilitation. The colonial administration weaponized collective punishment, levying punitive fines, seizing cattle herds and food stores to induce compliance, and deploying systematic physical and sexual torture (including castrations, severe beatings, and public violations) overseen by colonial police and the Kenya Regiment.
As historians David Anderson and Caroline Elkins established through evidence brought to light during the landmark Mutua and Others v. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office High Court litigation (2011-2013), the English colonial state deliberately orchestrated Operation Legacy on the eve of decolonization. Highly incriminating documentation, the secret "migrated archives" held at Hanslope Park, was systematically purged, burnt, or concealed in covert repositories for more than half a century. Just as in post-1746 Scotland, the English colonial state paired the physical destruction of indigenous civilian subsistence with deliberate administrative denial, systemic archival censorship, state-sanctioned document destruction (Operation Legacy), epistemological gaslighting, and institutionalized historical amnesia.
Four continents, two centuries, a single structural continuum:
- Decisive conventional military defeat of indigenous forces.
- Unrestricted punitive sweeps and sustained, gendered terror against non-combatants.
- The planned liquidation of food security, livestock, shelter, and mobility.
- Juridical epistemicide: the outlawing of indigenous attire, language, customary legal structures, and ancestral naming conventions.
- The co-optation of the traumatized, dispossessed survivors as subaltern imperial mercenaries, deployed on the frontiers of the empire to execute upon other colonized populations the identical subjugation they endured at home.
Scotland represents the earliest iteration of this colonial template, and the only case where colonial metropolitan historiography persistently refuses to apply the analytical categories of colonial conquest, epistemicide, linguicide, genocide, ethnic cleansing, or state organised famine. That evasion is not an index of what occurred in the glens of Lochaber, Morar, and Appin. It represents an index of the enduring power of colonial historiography to conceal the foundational violence of the English colonial state.
How It Was Made Unsayable: Historiographical Neutralization, Discursive Policing, Imperial Subaltern Co-optation, and the Romantic Overwrite
The documentary record of the post-Culloden pacification is divided between two distinct technologies of colonial rule; what the state deliberately suppressed and concealed, and the public historiography it constructed to sanitize what remained.
The archival record is far from whole. Much of the operational machinery of terror was shielded from public scrutiny through private sequestration and systematic weeding. The unvarnished operational papers of William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, the administrative center of the scorched-earth campaign, were removed from public state registers and locked within the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, insulated from independent examination for generations. Across the regiments of the occupying army, local field logs, punitive garrison daybooks, and immediate operational orders were routinely destroyed or withheld, leaving the surviving State Papers (TNA SP 54) as a heavily curated administrative facade.
The archival status of the Duke of Cumberland’s operational papers is not an innocent accident of historical provenance. It’s a structural condition of colonial evidence. As Ann Laura Stoler demonstrates in Along the Archival Grain, imperial archives do not function as neutral repositories of accumulated fact, but as technologies of governance that actively dictate what can be officially known, what must be cordoned off as state secret, and what is designated to be forgotten. Reading the English colonial archive along its grain exposes this documentary containment as a standard imperial technology. The daybooks, confidential situation reports, and unvarnished command orders of the prince who directed the campaign were not deposited in a public national repository, but removed to the private custody of the reigning royal house whose direct ancestor commanded the violence; sequestered behind the discretionary, permission-based gates of the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. This private hoarding of state violence mirrors the English colonial state’s broader technology of documentary containment. Just as the colonial English Foreign Office covertly spirited thousands of colonial administration files to Hanslope Park under Operation Legacy to sanitize the end of empire in Kenya and Malaya, Cumberland’s papers were insulated from independent parliamentary and legal scrutiny. In both instances, the colonial center shielded the machinery of its darkest counter-insurgency campaigns by transforming public evidence of state crime into privileged, private property.
Nevertheless, even within the surviving public record (catalogued, accessioned, and available across national repositories) an extraordinary volume of incriminating evidence remains. The state therefore faced a secondary challenge: how to render consultable evidence intellectually inert. The solution was the construction of a hegemonic public historiography within which the archive possesses no conceptual space to be meaningfully read. The evidence survived in fragments, but the interpretive categories required to register its gravity were systematically dismantled. This epistemological silencing was engineered through several distinct ideological mechanisms.
The Dynastic and Fratricidal Frame
The foundational orthodoxy of unionist historiography insists that the 1745-1746 conflict was exclusively a dynastic civil dispute between competing European royal claimants (the German Hanoverians and the Stuarts) in which Scots fought on both sides, thereby precluding any analysis through the lenses of national subjugation or colonial conquest. This formulation dissolves on contact with the material reality of what followed Culloden.
A conventional dynastic succession dispute between sovereign European elites does not terminate in the statutory prohibition of an entire civilization’s clothing, the planned administrative erasure of ancestral clan surnames under pain of penal transportation, the total abolition of an indigenous customary legal system, the commercial expropriation of land tenure, and the deliberate destruction of agricultural seed corn to engineer civilian famine. These are not counter-measures directed against a rival claimant. They constitute structural operations designed to neutralize and assimilate an indigenous population.
The English Hanoverian colonial state understood this reality perfectly in real time. 18th century London prints and state propaganda consistently racialized the Highland army, depicted the campaign under national symbols (the Saltire and thistle), and framed the post-battle pacification as the definitive containment of a distinct, unassimilated Scottish polity that posed an existential threat to the colonial 1707 Union.
The Terminological Hedge as Discursive Policing
Within contemporary academic discourse, a procedural dispute exists over the precise taxonomic label for the post-Culloden campaign. Allan I. Macinnes characterizes the enterprise as systematic state terrorism with genocidal intent that crossed into targeted elimination. Murray Pittock, conversely, prefers the designation of ethnic cleansing, arguing that the kinetic atrocities, while brutal, lacked the centralized bureaucratic uniformity demanded by strict legal thresholds of total physical extermination.
What requires rigorous decolonial critique is not the scholastic debate itself, but the way this dispute is weaponized within public intellectual culture. The empirical facts are undisputed across all scholarly sides; the summarily executed wounded at Culloden, the scorched-earth sweep of the western seaboard, the deliberate seizure of cattle, the burning of grain stores and seed, the mass transportations, and the statutory proscription of material culture are universally documented.
Outside the seminar room, the academic dispute is instrumentalized to invalidate the entire conceptual register of international criminal law. Rather than evaluating whether the campaign constituted genocide, crimes against humanity, or ethnic cleansing, political and media gatekeepers deploy the disagreement to argue that using such terminology at all is inherently illegitimate; dismissed as anachronistic hyperbole, grievance politics, or an offensive appropriation of "real" colonial atrocities overseas. An analytical qualification inside the academy is converted into an absolute discursive prohibition outside it.
Here lies the supreme efficacy of the English colonial apparatus, which does not rely solely on overt, heavy-handed censorship to suppress the historical record of Scotland's subjugation. Instead, it deploys a sophisticated, integrated ecosystem; uniting metropolitan media, publishing cartels, state broadcasters, and entrenched academic gatekeepers; to police the boundaries of permissible discourse.
The mechanism operates through discursive laundering. When high-level academic debates nuance the taxonomy of state violence; parsing whether the post-Culloden campaign constitutes genocide, crimes against humanity, or ethnic cleansing; the English colonial media machine seized upon that hesitation to extinguish the entire moral and legal register. The academic caveat is weaponized as an editorial veto. Any attempt to apply the universal grammar of decolonial critique, postcolonial studies, international criminal law, or settler-colonial studies to the Scottish experience is immediately pathologized across the press and broadcast spectrum. It is systematically branded as "grievance politics", "parochial victimhood", "blood and soil ethno-nationalism", "ahistorical hyperbole", or an insulting trivialization of atrocities committed against non-European peoples.
By establishing this false binary; where Scotland is permitted to exist only as an enthusiastic co-architect of the English Empire or as a quaint regional curiosity; the English or Anglo-British ideological state apparatus achieves an extraordinary feat of cognitive containment. It transforms an empirical, documented record of military pacification, genocide, cultural erasure, and forced demographic clearance into something unspeakable within polite civic debate. The trauma is quarantined and the coloniality of the relationship is masked. The English colonial center preserves its foundational national myth of an enlightened, consensual, voluntary and benevolent parliamentary union.
Imperial Subaltern Co-optation and the "Martial Race" Myth
The third mechanism was structural and socio-military through the swift, calculated absorption of the defeated population into the global coercive apparatus of the English Empire. Stripped of their ancestral weapons, pastoral cattle herds, communal land rights, and traditional attire, young Highland men faced an engineered material choice between destitution, transatlantic penal transportation, or enlistment in the newly formed Highland regiments of the Anglo-British Army (such as the Fraser Highlanders and the Black Watch).
By redeploying surviving Gaels as shock troops in North America, India, and the Caribbean, the English imperial state executed a dual colonial coup. It neutralized the demographic threat of domestic insurrection while simultaneously constructing the racialized Victorian myth of the Highland "martial race"; loyal, ferocious, and inherently suited for imperial conquest. This subaltern military participation was subsequently retrofitted by unionist historians as proof of willing, enthusiastic partnership in the British imperial project. The reality was a classic colonial manoeuvre, identical to British methods later employed with the Gurkhas, Sikhs, and Kikuyu; disarming an indigenous population at home, conscripting its impoverished survivors, and utilizing their imperial service to retroactively erase the state violence that dispossessed them.
The Romantic Overwrite and Aesthetic Expropriation
Within a century of Culloden, the Gàidhealtachd was transformed into the commodified aesthetic playground of the very imperial power that had ethnically cleared it; with the romanticized Highlands of Sir Walter Scott’s pageants, Queen Victoria’s retreat at colonially acquired Balmoral, the inventional tartan craze, the aristocratic deer forest, and the nostalgic myth of the Scottish martial warrior.
A living territory was depopulated of its people and then re-packaged as uninhabited scenery. The breacan (tartan) and plaid, which in 1747 incurred seven years of penal servitude in the Caribbean colonies, were worn by the English monarch at Balmoral in 1852. The legislative proscription and the Victorian romanticization are not antithetical. They represent two stages of a single colonial sequence. The romanticization became culturally possible only because the proscription, demilitarization, and clearance had successfully eliminated the indigenous society as an autonomous political reality. Balmoral itself stands upon territory whose legal commodification traces directly back through the state forfeiture and land-clearance apparatus established under the Annexing Acts.
In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Trouillot identifies four distinct structural moments at which power silences historical reality:
- The creation of sources (the moment of fact creation);
- The creation of archives (the moment of fact assembly);
- The creation of narratives (the moment of fact retrieval); and
- The making of history in the final instance (the moment of retrospective significance).
The historical silencing of the Scottish Highlands and Scotland in general was accomplished primarily at the third and fourth thresholds. The raw sources were created; the state papers, court registers, and military logs were preserved in national archives. But a colonial narrative was systematically erected over that material; a totalizing myth that naturalized colonial annexation as progressive modernization and aestheticized clearance as romantic folklore, holding metropolitan culture captive for 280 years.
The Unmarked Crime: Heritage Sanitization, Spatial Amnesia, Curated Grief, and Colonial Erasure
Drummossie Moor has been converted into a premier heritage asset. Administered with curated solemnity, the battlefield is maintained with manicured footpaths, multi-lingual audio guides, and reverently tended clan stones. It fulfills every requirement of modern state memorialization. It provides an aestheticized container for regulated public grief and neutralizes ideological conflict, while processing historical violence into revenue-generating tourism.
But Drummossie Moor is merely where the kinetic engagement occurred. A single afternoon's engagement is not the core of this history.
The true subject is what was systematically executed in the years that followed; the liquidation of over 20,000 head of pastoral cattle driven south to metropolitan markets; the methodical incineration of hundreds of civilian clachans and townships; the confiscation and smashing of the maritime littoral fleet (birlinns, currachs, and yawls); the deliberate destruction of agricultural seed corn to engineer seasonal starvation; the weaponized sexual violence systematically deployed against pregnant, nursing, and subaltern women under martial law; the state-drafted regulations to legally efface ancestral surnames; the statutory proscription of indigenous dress and legal systems; the conditioning of religious assembly upon verbal fealty to an alien monarch; and the vast highland territories where, nearly a decade later, the English Crown's own administrative factors and surveyors for the Annexed Estates were still recording profound structural destitution.
For that prolonged colonial program, the contemporary Scottish state and its civic heritage apparatus provide no visitor centres. There is no national memorial to the violated and displaced women of the Gàidhealtachd or commemorative marker standing among the bracken where the burned townships of Knoydart, Morar, and Lochaber once sustained communal life. There is no official plaque acknowledging the carceral network of over 650 military posts that transformed northern Scotland into an occupied zone; and not a single state-funded interpretive panel anywhere in Scotland that openly states the conclusion documented by the historical body administering Culloden itself; that this was a deliberate, state-directed campaign marked by genocidal intent; and was actually genocide.
This spatial amnesia exposes the foundational rule of colonial heritage management. A colonized people is permitted to mourn a military defeat but strictly prohibited from naming a genocide.
Conventional battlefield mourning is safe for the colonial state. It confines violence to an isolated tactical encounter between two opposing armies, framing the outcome as an inevitable, tragic prerequisite to English modernity and constitutional stability. To name the subsequent pacification as colonial subjugation, epistemicide, and genocidal destruction, however, fractures the foundational myth of the “British” Union. It shatters the false narrative of an enlightened, consensual 18th century partnership and exposes the English colonial state as an colonial empire forged through the violent, physical elimination of an indigenous society at its own land frontier.
The Battle of Culloden was concluded in under an hour. The campaign that followed spanned years and was planned across cabinet memorandums and military dispatches; sitting fully accessioned in the archives of the state that executed it; catalogued, consultable, yet ideologically quarantined.
That systemic, unacknowledged elimination is the historical reality left without a state memorial. It is the suppressed truth this counter-monument exists to record.
Read Liberation Scotland's Colonial Markers documentation.
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