the southern and eastern part of the region, as land was enclosed, it was let to fewer tenants, with larger individual holdings. These larger units employed farm servants and labourers and also provided work for cottars and crofters. This workforce included former tenants from the old system. Whilst there were large pastoral farms, there were also mixed and arable farms—both of which needed labour. The population of the south and east Highlands only grew slightly from 1755 to 1841. This is explained by migration to the accessible Lowlands to find work and the relative unavailability of small tenancies. This gave this part of the Highlands some similarities to the Lowland clearances. Together with the better climate of the southern and eastern Highlands, the more diverse agricultural system gave a reasonable level of prosperity to the area. Agricultural change in the Hebrides and the western coastal areas north of Fort William produced a different economic and social structure. This area is termed the "crofting region"; crofting communities became the dominant social system here, as land was enclosed and the run rig management of the multi-tenant replaced. The major part of the land was given over to large-scale pastoral sheep farming. This provided few jobs, compared to the arable and mixed farms in the south and east Highlands. The main industries intended for those displaced to crofting communities were fishing and kelp. Initially, this seemed, to the landlords and their advisors, an ideal way of providing profitable employment for those made redundant by competition for farm leases by the higher-rent-paying sheep farms. Over time, crofts were subdivided, allowing more tenants to live on them (but with less land per person). Crofting communities had a high proportion of cottars—those with the least access to land and without any formal lease to document what they did hold. Population growth was rapid, due to both subdivision and the lower rate of migration to the Lowlands. When the kelp market collapsed a few years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the deficiency of the crofting model was exposed: overcrowded communities with limited or no ability to grow enough food for subsistence and now without the industry on which their community relied. This is the area that was most reliant on the potato, and therefore severely hit by the Highland Potato Famine. The census of 1841 recorded 167,283 people living in the crofting region (as per