A person's home country is often closely tied to their identity.

Even countries with similarities like the United States, Canada, and England have their own customs and heritage that makes the people born there unique.

It's easy to assume that continuing to call your country home is your birthright.

After all, you are born there and citizenship is all you know.

Sometimes, though, outsiders can take that birthright away. Today, Scotland is a sparsely populated country, with most of its 5.5 million citizens living

inside one of its seven major cities.

In fact, the population is so low given its size, it's often rightfully joked that there

are more Scots living in places like Canada than there are in Scotland itself.

But it wasn't always that way. Back in the 1700s, the country was

a lot busier with various clans that called Scotland home. That was until the Highland

clearances took place and forced many in the northern part of the nation out of their homes forever.

In 1707, economic troubles in Scotland led them to having no choice but to form a partnership

with their southern neighbors England, a partnership that would go on to become known as the

United Kingdom. While such a union later went on to include Wales and at times parts of Ireland,

it was always the tense divide between the original two nations that, in many

ways, defined the early instability of the UK. As a result of them throwing their hat in with England,

the Scots had managed to rescue themselves from certain financial destruction, but that didn't

mean many of the citizenry there were happy about being tied to them long term.

That was because there had always been a rivalry between the two countries even prior to that.

As a result of the new situation, said rivalry was now able to create a rift within the northern

lands themselves. It turned out that a lot of people living in the southern part of Scotland felt like

the old feudal clan system they were still living under was backwards and out of date,

...