Going back to our McGill roots for one of this year’s featured committees, we are beyond excited to invite you back to Scotland circa 1860, where delegates will become immersed in everything the Clan Revival period has (had) to offer. Exploring themes of identity and cultural preservation, delegates will navigate both inter-clan and external relations while pursuing attempts to revitalize the highland way of life through mediums such as art, language, and ceremony. 

The Revival period comes immediately after the Highland Clearances, where rural Scottish communities were forcibly displaced from their ancestral lands by a capitalist tide that swept the countryside, and overturned the common agrarian lifestyle. With reverberations of this upset continuing to be felt, delegates will consider not only the concrete impacts on land and the economy, but also the intangible ways that the Clearances disrupted highland language, traditions, and social structures. Expounding their disempowerment and fueling hostility towards a British government which was seen to represent only the urban English, highlanders’ rights to own arms, as well as traditional tartans, had been removed by law. The disparities between the clan tradition of self-government and the increasingly restrictive legal environment in which they were situated make abundantly clear the need for clans to evolve to an era that seemed determined to leave them behind. 

This discussion is not merely one of cultural celebration - it is a political negotiation. Issues of land ownership, religious division, and migration, creating an increasingly broad Scottish diaspora, must be tackled alongside tartans and titles. Some see opportunity in adapting the clan lifestyle to the modern era, while others see a threat to long-standing social order. Should the clan system be a moral anchor for Scottish identity within the British Empire? In the quest to receive the dignity and recognition long denied by an unfavourable crown, what concessions must be made?

Representing a blend of Jacobites, political elites, and pillars of both art and industry, delegates will meaningfully engage with difficult questions like what it means to have cultural ‘unity’, and what barriers have prevented Scotland’s proud houses from collaborating for hundreds of years. Success may yield a united Scotland, proud in its history and clan autonomy; failure may further subordinate and divide it across region, class, and language. 

The Dais