This heavily illustrated and innovative study is founded upon personal documents, town council minutes, legal cases, inventories, travellers’ tales, plans and drawings relating to some 30 Scots burghs of the Georgian period. It establishes a distinctive history for the development of Scots burghs, their living patterns and legislative controls, and shows that the Scottish urban experience was quite different from other parts of Britain.
With population expansion, and economic and social improvement, Scots of the time experienced immense change both in terms of urban behaviour and the decay of ancient privileges and restrictions. This volume shows how the Scots Georgian burgh developed to become a powerfully controlled urban community, with disturbance deliberately designed out.
This is a collaborative history, melding together political, social, economic, urban and architectural histories, to achieve a comprehensive perspective on the nature of the Scottish Georgian town. Not so much a history by growth and numbers, this pioneering study of Scottish urbanization explores the type of change and the quality of result.
* Politics and the Nation: Britain in the Mid- Eighteenth Century. (Oxford, 2002) 392pp. * 'The Scots, the Westminster Parliament, and the British State in the Eighteenth Century' in Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660-1850. (Manchester , 2003) pp. 124-145 * (ed.) Scotland in the Age of the French Revolution . (Edinburgh, 2005) 1-22, 49-78, 164-195pp. * 'Scottish-English Connections in the British Radicalism of the 1790s' in Anglo-Scottish Relations from 1603 to 1900. Vol 127 (Oxford , 2005) pp. 189-212