The Napier Commission
The evidence gathered by the Napier Commission captures in English (in many cases, in translation from Gaelic) the voice of a people and their grievances. It gives us direct testimony of the profound issues affecting ordinary people of the Highlands and Islands at the end of the nineteenth century.
This Commission marked the start of a century of land reform legislation and is a resource of near-unique importance.
The five volumes were originally digitised and hosted by West Highland College UHI. We are delighted to make them available here to university staff and students, and the broader public. They are in pdf format:
- Napier Commission Vol 1
- Napier Commission Vol 2
- Napier Commission Vol 3
- Napier Commission Vol 4
- Napier Commission Vol 5
Also available is an index to the reports, created by Guido Blokland.
Photo courtesy of Historylinks Museum, Dornoch.
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You might be interested in these free-to-view articles by Dr Elizabeth Ritchie and Dr Iain Robertson from the Centre for History.
- Faith and the family: Family life and the spread of evangelical culture in the Scottish Gaidhealtachd, c.1790-c.1860 (Dr Elizabeth Ritchie)
- Men and Place: Male identity and the meaning of place in the nineteenth-century Scottish Gaidhealtachd (Dr Elizabeth Ritchie)
- The Township, the Pregnant Girl and the Church: Community dynamics, gender and social control in early nineteenth-century Scotland (Dr Elizabeth Ritchie)
- Spaces of assertion: Informal land occupations in the Scottish Highlands after 1914 (Dr Iain Robertson)
- People of the croft: Visualising land, heritage and identity (Dr Iain Robertson)
- Hardscrabble Heritage: The ruined blackhouse and crofting landscape as heritage from below (Dr Iain Robertson)
Study this subject at masters level
The Napier Commission is one of the key primary sources on our MLitt History of the Highlands and Islands programme, available online from wherever you are in the world. It is an important and relevant source for several postgraduate modules, each available on a stand-alone basis: