This heavily illustrated and innovative study is founded upon personal documents, town council minutes, legal cases, inventories, travellers' tales, plans and drawings relating to some 30 Scots burghs of the Georgian period. It establishes a distinctive a
Edinburgh was an Enlightenment city of regional, national and global influence. But how did the people of Enlightenment Edinburgh understand and order their world? How did they encounter, compare and produce different kinds of spaces, from the urban to the world scale? And how did this city set the universal standards by which other places should be judged and transformed? The Geographies of Enlightenment Edinburgh answers these questions by exploring the thousands of urban plans, county surveys, travel accounts and encyclopaedias that passed through a busy Edinburgh bookshop over four decades. It reveals how these geographical publications were produced and shared, and sheds light on the people who bought and used them - including moral philosophers, silk merchants, school teachers, ship's surgeons and slave owners. This is the story of how specific methods of mapping space came ultimately to predict and organize it, creating a new world in Edinburgh's image. By connecting global processes of knowledge production to intimate accounts of its reception in the city, this book deepens our understanding of the Scottish Enlightenment and the world it made.
This is a study of Enlightenment in Edinburgh like no other. Using data and models provided by urban innovation and Smart City theory, it pinpoints the distinctive features that made Enlightenment in the Scottish capital possible. In a journey packed with evidence and incident, Murray Pittock explores various civic networks - such as the newspaper and printing businesses, the political power of the gentry and patronage networks, as well as the pub and coffee-house life - as drivers of cultural change. His analysis reveals that the attributes of civic development, which lead to innovation and dynamism, were at the heart of what made Edinburgh a smart city of 1700.
Provides for a historical perspective of Scotland's interaction with the world beyond its borders. As one of the most prolific historians of his generation, Allan I. Macinnes, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Strathclyde, has been foremost in promoting an international rather than insular approach to the study of Scotland. In a distinguished career he has written extensively on the Scottish Highlands, the British revolutions, the formation of the United Kingdom, the Jacobite movement, and Scottish involvement in the British Empire. The chapters collected here reflect the extent of these interests and a commitment to understanding Scotland - or indeed, other territorial units - in an international or global context. Covering a period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, essays examine the complex interaction of the peoples of the British and Irish isles; they consider Scottish participation in Britannic and European conflict; and they explore Scottish involvement in business networks, political unions, and maritime empires. From intellectual and cultural exchange to political and military upheaval, Scotland and the Wider World will be key reading for anyone interested in the antecedents to Scotland's current international standing.
This groundbreaking study examines the production of ephemeral literature and the creation of a mass reading public in lowland Scotland between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The Press and the People transforms our understanding of popular culture in early modern Scotland and Britain more widely.
Social clubs as they existed in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland were varied: they could be convivial, sporting, or scholarly, or they could be a significant and dynamic social force, committed to improvement and national regeneration as well as to sociability. The essays in this volume examine the complex history of clubs and societies in Scotland from 1700 to 1830. Contributors address attitudes toward associations, their meeting places and rituals, their links with the growth of the professions and with literary culture, and the ways in which they were structured by both class and gender. By widening the context in which clubs and societies are set, the collection offers a new framework for understanding them, bringing together the inheritance of the Scottish past, the unique and cohesive polite culture of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the broader context of associational patterns common to Britain, Ireland, and beyond.
A quarter of a century ago, Professor Peter Borsay identified a specifically urban phenomenon of cultural revival that took root in the late seventeenth century, leading to the flowering of a wide range of cultural forms and the extensive remodelling of the townscape along classically inspired lines. Borsay called this the ‘English Urban Renaissance’. These essays, including Borsay’s reflective and thought-provoking revisiting of his concept, offer a wide-ranging exploration of the continuing and still developing impact of the ‘English Urban Renaissance’ and investigate the wider impact of the concept beyond England. The essays reiterate the importance of provincial towns as hubs of economic, cultural and political activity and the strength and vitality of urban culture beyond the metropolis. They trace the development of urban culture over time in the light of the concept of ‘urban renaissance’, showing how urban townscapes and cultural life were transformed throughout the long eighteenth century. Together, they establish the continuing impact and importance of Borsay’s concept, demonstrate the breadth of its influence in the UK and beyond, and point to possible areas of research for the future.
What kind of political representation existed in the Ancien Régime? Which social sectors were given a voice, and how were they represented in the institutions? These are some of the issues addressed by the authors of this book from different institutional angles (monarchies and republics; parliaments and municipalities), from various European territories and finally from a connected and comparative perspective. The aim is twofold: analyse the different mechanisms of political representation before Liberalism, their strengths and limitations; value the processes of oligarchisation and the possible mismatch between a libertarian model and a reality which was far from its idealised image.
Dugald Stewart's Empire of the Mind recasts the cultivation of a democratic intellect in the late Scottish Enlightenment. It comprises an intellectual history of what was at stake in moral education during a transitional period of revolutionary change between 1772 and 1828. Stewart was a child of the Scottish Enlightenment, who inherited the Scottish philosophical tradition of teaching metaphysics as moral philosophy from the tuition of Adam Ferguson and Thomas Reid. But the Scottish Enlightenment intellectual culture of his youth changed in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Stewart sustained the Scottish school of philosophy by transforming how it was taught as professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. His elementary system of moral education fostered an empire of the mind in the universal pursuit of happiness. The democratization of Stewart's didactic Enlightenment—the instruction of moral improvement—in a globalizing, interconnected nineteenth-century knowledge economy is examined in this book.