HISTORIANS GENERALLY ACCEPT THAT interpersonal violence was a common feature of relationships between men in the past and that the contexts in which violence was perpetrated can reveal something about the mentalities and social roles of men in past societies. Nevertheless, it is also agreed that the modes of and occasions for violence vary according to their context, and thus there is a need to understand precisely the conditions that facilitate and legitimate interpersonal violence between men in different locales and time periods. While male violence appears to be ubiquitous – men form the overwhelming majority of perpetrators and victims of violent behaviour – its meaning is historically specific.

This chapter examines a type of modernising society – the Scottish Highlands in the period 1760–1840 – in which a code of violence governed by an indigenous culture of manhood was gradually superseded by a new culture with a new code concerning violence. This was in part the consequence of changing economic and social conditions in the Highlands as well as the imposition of a judiciary and law enforcers serving the aspirant bourgeois ideology of local elites and the demands of a distant state. It argues that violence against the (male) person was regarded as commonplace and to some degree legitimate in the rural Highland counties until at least the 1820s, that men of the rural labouring classes regarded violence as a means to protect or affirm their status, to restore honour or to avenge a wrong, and that this had previously been accepted or tolerated by Highland elites. But this association between a certain model of manhood and interpersonal violence was challenged increasingly from around 1800 by those who advocated civility and restraint amongst men, especially in the growing Highland town of Inverness, the centre of an emerging middle-class culture with changing social sensibilities. The borderline between acceptable and unacceptable, legitimate and illegitimate male violence shifted as a new conception of what constituted respectable manhood was disseminated. In the wake of the Jacobite risings and the repressive measures aimed at taming the Highlands, there was a more subtle and longer-term taming of everyday Highland manhood.