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Feudalism was eventually grafted onto the old kinship-based system, and enormously powerful clans were created. Meanwhile, inaccessible in their glens, the Highland clans remained a law unto themselves for another 600 years. A cultural and linguistic divide grew up between Gaelic-speaking Highlanders and the Lowland Scots who spoke Lallans, a language made up of English, Norse and Gaelic constituents.
The 17th century brought religious differences and civil wars. While there was an overall struggle to establish independence from Rome, Scotland was also divided between the Presbyterians, who shunned all ritual and hierarchy, and less-extreme Protestants who were more like the Anglicans south of the border. The wars left the country and the economy ruined, and anti-English feeling ran high. Graham of Claverhouse raised a band of Highlanders and in 1689 routed the English troops at Killiecrankie, near Pitlochry. In 1692 people were horrified by the treacherous massacre, on English government orders, of MacDonalds by Campbells in Glen Coe. The event became Jacobite (Stuart dynasty) propaganda that still resonates today.
Following the Act of Union of 1707, which united England and Scotland under a single parliament, the Jacobites, who never received much support outside the Highlands, rebelled. In the uprisings of 1715 and 1745 they attempted to replace the Hanoverian monarchy with Catholic Stuarts, notably James Edward Stuart (the son of the exiled James II, and known as the Old Pretender) and Bonnie Prince Charles Edward Stuart (James Edward's son, who was given the moniker the Young Pretender). Following the disastrous Jacobite defeat of 1745, the government banned private armies, wearing the kilt and playing the pipes. Many Jacobites were transported or executed; others forfeited their lands.
By the mid-19th century, overpopulation, poverty and the potato famine of the 1840s led to the tragic Highland Clearances. People were forced off the land and shipped or tricked into emigrating to North America, Australia and New Zealand. Those who remained were moved to small holdings known as crofts. Rents were extortionate and life for the crofters was extremely precarious. Common grazing ground was confiscated for sheep or deer. In the 1880s, the crofters rebelled and won a considerable measure of security.
In the mid-20th century, a major program to harness the Highlands' abundant water resources for hydro-electric power opened up the region and greatly improved the standard of living. The discovery of oil and gas in the North Sea in the 1970s brought prosperity to Aberdeen and the surrounding area, and to the Shetland Islands. However, most of the oil revenue was siphoned off to England. This, along with takeovers of Scots companies by English ones, fuelled increasing nationalist sentiment in Scotland.
Various (heavily subsidised) industries were set up in the Highlands but few lasted. During the 1990s, Inverness in particular grew rapidly as people flocked to the peaceful, unpolluted Highlands in search of a better way of life. From 1979 to 1997, the Scots were ruled by a Conservative British government for which the majority of them hadn't voted and nationalist feelings grew stronger. A referendum in 1997 on the creation of a Scottish Parliament received overwhelming support, and the first meeting of the new Scottish Parliament was held in 1999, signalling a new era of optimism and national pride.