This article argues that there were significant disagreements in the highlands over the utility of military recruitment. The difference between authority and jurisdiction provoked contentious debates that ran parallel to the extension of the fiscal-military state in the region. This article utilizes the correspondence of local authorities, ministers and landowners to highlight the considerable resistance to military rule, undermining the current assumption that a unified elite acted in partnership with the state upon an enfeebled poor. It asserts that recruitment must be seen as an ideological process, which divided the region's population along lines of personal interest, rather than socio-economic taxonomy.The historical understanding of the recruitment of the highland regiments in the eighteenth century reflects a broad perception that the region was hierarchical and inequitable. The large-scale recruitment of highland regiments to serve in the Seven Years' War, the War of American Independence, and in the Indian subcontinent, has been viewed in top-down, linear terms.The demand for highland manpower emanated from the government, emphasized by the frequently quoted comments of William Pitt and James Wolfe advocating the use of highland troops. 1 The needs of the fiscal-military state were thoroughly embraced by regional elites, for whom regiment raising was an attractive form of economic diversification, a rational response to the demands of a commercial society. The middling and upper ranks of highland society, providing the bulk of the officer class, are seen to have utilized their dirigiste control over the lives of their tenants to enlist men, simultaneously cementing their own place in the social hierarchy of the highlands. 2 Metropolitan perceptions that the region's manpower could be quickly and easily mobilized, views fully encouraged by local elites, created a regional peculiarity as the highlands became one of the most heavily 1 For the reproduction of the Pitt and Wolfe quotes, see

In the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the British state enacted a series of restrictive legal measures designed to pacify the Scottish Highlands and crush the military power of the Gael. With the evolution of scholarly work on the British state, these measures are increasingly seen through the prism of state power, with the Scottish Gàidhealtachd cast as the victim of a fiscal-military system determined to impose obedience on its territory and peoples. In analyzing the implementation and enforcement of the laws passed between 1746 and 1752, this article challenges this narrative. By focusing attention on the legal system—particularly with regards enforcement—this article considers the local reception of the laws and the ideological, legal, and bureaucratic limitations to state authority. Yet it also explores how clan chiefs and traditional elites, who were the primary target of the legislation, quickly turned the laws to their own advantage. This analysis challenges the idea of effective state intervention in the Gàidhealtachd after 1746 and instead brings attention to how parliamentary legislation was mobilized by regional actors to local ends in ways that cast a long shadow over the history of the Scottish Highlands.

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