Marianne McLean explores the relationship between economic changes in the Highlands and the clansmen's emigration to Canada in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She challenges the currently accepted position endorsed in recent works by Eric Richards and J.M. Bumsted that the clearances and sheep farms did not have a central role in provoking mass emigration. While McLean does not argue that landlords forced people to leave, she uses local evidence to show that the economic changes brought about by these factors led many Highlanders to emigrate.