Counterinsurgency in the Age of Enlightenment: military ethnography of the ‘Highland Problem’

One of the first and closest ‘laboratories’ of the British Empire in terms of turning the British army into a colonial institution during protracted counterinsurgency was one of the inner Gaelic fringes of the United Kingdom, the Highlands of Scotland. It was there in the first half of the Eighteenth century that the army appeared as a corporate institution with its own views not just on its role in the defeating the Jacobite movement, but in resolving the ‘Highland Problem’, acquiring and applying militarily useable topographic and ethnographic knowledge as well as coercive power. The military presence in the Highlands of Scotland was based on intelligence, collaboration with local allies, social control and working civil-military relations, despite the lack of the unity of command during the whole period of the Jacobite movement. This was the dark side of the Enlightenment: the growth of knowledge about rebellious populations of the European empires that had been tested on the lines of ‘enlightened’ pacification and added to the toolbox of colonial counterinsurgency. It would help shape later methods of colonial counter-insurgency in the next century.