This book takes a fresh look at the rural economy of early modern Scotland. The primary focus is on the long period that preceded the rapid changes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It shows that this period, before the main era of agricultural ‘improvement’, was nevertheless far from static.

It is timely that this topic is being revisited now. Several classic studies of Scottish agriculture were published between the late 1970s and early 1990s, but, as we shall see, this productive period was followed by a gap in which scholarship moved into other areas. This book returns to the topic of agriculture with awareness of more recent scholarship.

Approaches to agriculture often begin with everyday farming practices. The book has much on this, and one chapter even looks at a farmer's own writing. By contrast, landlords and estate management are prominent in several chapters. Some of these chapters show landlords as innovators, while one chapter highlights small tenants’ labour-intensive contributions to ‘improvement’. Not all the chapters bring good news; there is a chapter on Scotland's most disastrous famine, that of 1622–23.

The book is about more than farming practices, though. Social, administrative and economic contexts of agriculture all receive attention. And the book opens with a cultural chapter, surveying the cultural context within which agriculture was ‘imagined’. Some topics are best investigated at local level, and five chapters carry out detailed local studies. An ambitious conceptual chapter on models of capitalism in the ‘mercantilist age’ treats Scotland itself as a local study of a much broader phenomenon. The book concludes with a historiographical overview, contextualising the history of agriculture within the work done on other aspects of Scottish history since the 1990s.

More will be said later about the chapters that follow in the present book, but at this point we turn to a review of the state of research on the history of Scottish agriculture. This review falls into three sections. First there is a section on the early modern period. This is often concerned with eighteenth-century ‘Improvement’ and with the relationship of ‘Improvement’ to what came before it. How should agricultural change be periodised between about 1500 and 1850? Second there is a shorter section reviewing medieval studies, again focusing on questions of periodisation of agricultural change. A third section then reviews scholarship that has followed particular disciplinary and thematic perspectives.