Much of the early emigration was middle-class led, with small landowners often taking whole collections of tenants and dependants along with them. The evictions were largely later; most of the lairds concerned were, as has been said, Scottish (though at this stage they had got well into the habit of having their sons educated at English public schools); a whole mythology has grown up around the Clearances, and many people believe that this was some sort of action taken against Scotland by England, though it was nothing of the kind.

Apart from John Prebble's book, referred to above, a very useful source of historical and statistical information is John G. Gibson's Traditional Gaelic Bagpiping, 1745 - 1945 (McGill-Queen's University Press/ National Museums of Scotland, 1998), which examines in detail post-Culloden emigration patterns and also demolishes the popular myth that the bagpipes were banned in the wake of the Jacobite rebellions.

What is often forgotten is that similar dispossession took place in England during the Enclosure movement (income from wool being, again, a principal motive), with a great many people being burned out of their homes or otherwise evicted. No assisted passages to the colonies for most of them, though.