Wealth in the Highlands had always been calculated in men, but once the need for large numbers of fighting men was prevented and made illegal by the government at Westminster, for the first time a money economy entered Highland society. English landlords came in and replaced the Gaelic speaking lairds. Because they spent a great deal of time in the south, they needed to generate more money from their Highland estates in order to fund their (often extravagant) lifestyles and they did this by clearing their land of tenants and replacing them with profitable sheep farms.

There were 2 types of clearance, one following on from the other. The first kind was compulsory settlement on desolate and infertile land near the sea. The Highlanders who were moved to the coast were given a small piece of land - the croft. If this land was bad, the crofter was forced into kelping (collecting seaweed, the ashes of which were used to make soap and glass) to make a living. But if the land was good, then the crofter had to pay a high rent for it and so was still forced into kelping to pay for this. For the Highlanders who had been moved to the coast life was hard. They had to try to get used to a new lifestyle and to earn their living from fishing and kelping - which they had no experience of. Usually they tried to continue farming on their small plots of land. The second form of clearance was often provoked by the failure of the croft to provide the Highlanders with a living. The situation for many was hopeless - the numbers of people who were made to live on the coast along with huge increases in rent, over-fishing of coastal waters and over-kelping, resulted in starvation and poverty. When the kelp industry fell apart and the price of cattle decreased, this left a huge number of poor and needy people who were not able to pay their rent or to buy food.

In 1846 another blow hit the Highlands as the potato crop failed, resulting in famine, and so many were left with no choice but to emigrate to the colonies or head south. After the kelp industry collapsed and there was no work left, the landlords were only interested in clearing more land for more sheep runs to make money for themselves, so in some cases they paid for schemes to remove their tenants from Scotland to America or Australia. There was a constant flow of emigrants - mainly to blame on the huge pressures of population increase in the Highlands. The growth in kelping had encouraged the landowners to further divide the crofts and insist on large families to get as much work out of them as possible. However, the majority of Highlanders did not emigrate because they were too poor to afford this in the first place. Instead they went south to work in the factories in Lowland Scotland.

By the 1850s the Clearances were effectively at an end for several reasons - first of all there were no people left to evict, secondly the population had decreased, thirdly the economy was starting to pick up and finally the fishing industry was improving. Also the crofters were beginning to act on their own behalf. It had taken them so long to act for a number of reasons. They were slow to organise themselves effectively and the protests that there had been against the Clearances had been unplanned and disorganised. The loss of the traditional leaders in the Highlands and the destruction of the clan system as well as the actual shock of the effects of the Clearances meant that it had taken some time to produce new leaders from amongst themselves. The Church also influenced events because it described the Clearances as God's retribution of their sins on earth and it actively discouraged the Highlanders from protesting. The final end to the Clearances was the Crofters Act in 1886 which was passed after a struggle lasting for four years.