Numerous books and articles have been published on the ‘British’ Industrial Revolution. Most however either ignore Scotland, or pay lip-service to it. In many cases there is a failure to recognise that generalisations, particularly of the macro-economic variety, about the nature, timing and causes of ‘British’ (i.e. what is in effect English) industrialisation do not necessarily apply to Scotland [153]. Often too, references to Scotland stress a single aspect - most frequently the cotton industry of Glasgow, Paisley and elsewhere in west-central Scotland, or the same region's coal and iron and related industries, which underpinned Scotland's ‘Victorian economic miracle’. Important as this region and these products undoubtedly were to Scotland's economy, such approaches fail to recognise the diversity of Scotland's economic experience in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Keith Wrightson's observation that there were ‘many Englands’ is equally applicable to Scotland where there were several other identifiable economic regions [318:258]. Considerable attention will be paid in this book to the most important of these.

Outside the central Lowlands, the most distinctive region throughout the period was the Scottish Highlands and Islands, which accounted for some 20 per cent of the Scottish population in 1801, 350,000 people in 1831. There is much substance in the remark that Scotland in the 1840s was a ‘dual economy’, with the south becoming increasingly capitalistic and industrialised, whereas the north, which too had felt the impact of capitalist impulses, ‘was a world of traditional values, oriented round the peasant desire to cling to a holding of land despite intolerable demographic pressures’ [192:81].

In neither region however was the pattern of economic and social change uniform. Lowland Scotland was not simply a producer of cotton, minerals and ships. By the mid-nineteenth century the economy of Dundee and the towns and villages of the surrounding area in east-central Scotland had become firmly based on coarse linen and jute. In Dundee itself, Scotland's third town after Glasgow and Edinburgh, were located the world's two biggest mill and factory complexes, in linen and jute respectively [291]. To the south, in Fife, specialisation occurred in smaller towns such as Dunfermline, with fine linens. Manufacturing in the rural counties to the south of Edinburgh - Border country - was focussed on wool.