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WEST HIGHLAND CHIEFDOMS, 1500-1745. R.A. DODGSHON Despite the considerable literature on Highland clans before 1745, there exists no discussion on whether they operated an exchange system. Anthropological work on the non-market exchange systems of kin-based societies has shown that such exchange systems served social and political ends as well as the more obviously economic. Originating as an exchange of marriageable women between social groups, they were broadened so as to embrace material goods like food, items of personal ornament and weaponry. Initially, they involved a symmetrical movement, an exchange of equivalencies. However, with the rise of chiefdoms, the flows involved became asymmetrical and instrumental, with chiefs using their control over exchange as a prop to their power. Recent work on these chiefly systems of redistributive exchange have highlighted their role in shaping the character of the chiefdom. Chiefly control over prestige goods enabled them to contract favourable marriage alliances and to build elaborate hierarchies of power. Where such monopolistic control broke down or did not exist, chiefly power structures tended towards a flatter, more localised form, with numerous petty chiefs striving, through displays of feasting and feuding, to be at the centre of the next eruption of power. By the time we can examine Highland chiefdoms in detail, c. 1500, they were experiencing change. The Lordship of the Isles, an elaborate hierarchy of power, had just collapsed. Unfortunately, we are not able to establish whether the character of the Lordship was shaped by chiefly control over prestige goods, like the light armour that figures so prominently in Highland funerary sculpture of the late medieval period, though such goods certainly had a place in the Gaelic exchange schemes of medieval Ireland. The collapse of the Lordship saw the emergence of flatter, more localised systems of chiefly power. Consistent with recent anthropological work, these petty chiefdoms generated intense ri valries that found expression in displays of feasting and feuding. Control over food was crucial. Highland chiefs gathered in vast quantities of food. Ab origine these flows of food had the meaning of tribute but had become a form of rent by the sixteenth century. The food involved was used to create a clan-wide insurance against crop failure, to support the chiefs retinue of fighting men, pipers, poets, harpers and the like, and to sustain the feasting displays of the chief. Those clans, like the MacGregors who lost ground in the struggle for land, competed through inter-clan feuding, with grain and cattle invariably being taken as booty. Indeed, feasting and feuding, or 'fighting with food', became so endemic in the Highlands over the sixteenth century that the government eventually enacted legislation against it. R.A. Dodgshon, Department of Geography, University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, Dyfed, Wales, U.K. SY23 3 DB. RA. Dodgshon (1986) West Highland Chiefdoms, 1500-1745. In: R. Mitchison and P. Roebuck (eds.) Comparative Aspects of Irish and Scottish Social and Economic Development, 1500-1850. Edinburgh: John Donald Ltd.