As I understand it the govt managed to intervene just enough so that deaths from starvation or associated diseases were in the thousands, not the millions. I got the impression they let it get worse in Ireland to punish the independence movement which didn't have its counterpart in Scotland (unless you're talking about the Jacobites, but they had been smashed at Culloden 100 years previous). However the misery and outright destitution was real and played a big part in permanently emptying much of the highlands & islands of their human population. The lairds & victorian era empire politicians were more than happy with this outcome, since they wanted an end to subsistence farming, increased rents from fewer tenants and an expanded population of landless people willing to work in the factories for whatever money they could get. They also provided useful footsoldiers for imperial expansion into the new world & Australia, often ironically imposing the same kind of dispossession on the native people that they themselves had faced.

I like James Hunter's writing best - Making of the Crofting Community, Other Side of Sorrow, A Dance Called America. Tom Devine's Great Highland Famine has more thorough research and gives a more generous interpretation of the actions of the lairds. John Prebble's Highland Clearances is a classic (about halfway through it now) though more of a popular history, lacking footnotes and not attempting to be impartial - though how can you be with the subject material?

Glad I could introduce you to the subject!

cheers,
I