INTRODUCTION

Sustained investigation of the economy and society of early modern Scotland has occurred only since the mid-1970s. Earlier generations were content to focus almost exclusively on the developments of church and state in the period before the Union of 1707. Out of this neglect came the widespread acceptance of an influential stereotype. It became a commonplace in the textbook literature until the 1960s that the Scottish experience was exceptional in relation both to England and to other ‘advanced’ European economies. Scotland in c. 1700 was said to be different, not only in its poverty, the archaism of the social structures and the timeless rigidity of the economic system, but also in its insecurity and instability, a direct result of weak central authority and the threat of baronial insurrection. In an article published in 1967 Hugh Trevor-Roper expressed the orthodoxy in succinct terms: ‘at the end of the seventeenth century, Scotland was a by-word for irredeemable poverty, social backwardness [and] political faction’ (Trevor-Roper 1967: 1,636).

Since then, however, a more complex and subtle evaluation of the national economic condition has emerged, as a growing army of Scottish historical scholars has asked fresh questions and plundered the archives in the search for answers. The corpus of published work has therefore grown significantly, though it has to be acknowledged that the recent historiography still lacks the sheer richness and density of the work on English economic and social history described at length throughout this volume. Key areas, such as demographic history, are constrained by the inadequacy of records.