A History of the Scottish People, 1560 - 1830

by T.C. Smout

By far the most stimulating, the most instructive and the most readable account of Scotch history that I have read ... this splendid work carries us from Knox to Neilson, from the hot gospel of Calvin to the hot-blast of the smelting process - and incidentally seeks to explain the change. For always, in following this lucid narrative, we see an original mind at work, questioning and explaining, as well as illustrating. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Sunday Times

Genres: History, Scotland, Reference, Nonfiction

544 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Thomas Christopher Smout CBE, FBA, FRSE, FSA Scot, FRSGS is a Scottish academic, historian, author and Historiographer Royal in Scotland.

He has written extensively on demographic history and many aspects of economic history. Since the mid-1990s, he has developed the new discipline of environmental history in Scotland, giving the Ford Lectures in Oxford in 1999, published under the title of Nature Contested, Environmental History in Scotland and Northern England since 1600. His most recent publications in this field have been in woodland history and an environmental history of the Firth of Forth.

Reviews

[Marguerite Kaye · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a book of facts. It requires you to have a reasonable knowledge of the basic history of the time, so it's not for someone interested in who fought who or who governed who. But if you want to know how the wars and the laws and the crown and the parliament affected the people of Scotland, then it's brilliant. Full of the kind of fascinating, horrible, funny and outrageous stories that make history both personal and memorable, it is really well structures, split into the eras before and after the Reformation, and showing how ground-shifting events like the Unions of Crown and Parliament, the succession from Stuart to Hanover, the Clearances, the industrial revolution and advances in medicine, wealth, education etc affected the Scots, Highlanders, Lowlanders and city dwellers. It shows what life was like, what people endured, how they lived, how social change affected them - and how it didn't touch them at all. It's the kind of book which can be read from end to end or easily dipped into for fun, interest or research, and I would highly, highly recommend it.

[allie :)]

good riddance. now to finish the required paper

[David Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an incredible piece of writing on 300 years of Scottish History.
It is also strangely entertaining in places - a far cry from the dry expectations of such books.
Professor T.C. Smout did an extraordinary job. It should be in every Scottish school and University.
(The teaching of Scottish History was largely banned in many Scottish schools for decades).

It tells the truth, explodes myths and replaces them with tremendous insight.
A must read for any Scot, or people who have an interest in our country.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this out of interest in high school; years later, when I was a university student in Scotland, it was one of my first-year texts.