Description

Once a small and isolated country with an unenviable reputation for poverty and instability, by 1800 Scotland was emerging, within a triumphant British state, as an economic powerhouse, a major colonial power and an internationally-acclaimed centre of European philosophy, science and literature. In search of explanations, this full history explores the experiences and responses of a people whose world was being fundamentally reconfigured. Starting with the momentous Act of Union, it traces the unsuccessful Jacobite rebellions and bewildering encounters with commercial development, industrialisation and social change, to the extraordinary cultural achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment and the exploitation of the unprecedented opportunites available in England, India and North America.