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Scotland 391
period, however, the significance of urban development should not be
underestimated.
Between 1500 and 1600 the proportion of the nation’s population liv-
ing in the larger towns of 10,000 citizens and above nearly doubled, and it
did so again by 1700. Edinburgh, the capital and biggest town, had a pop-
ulation of around 30,000 by the early eighteenth century. Aberdeen and
Dundee had about 10,000 inhabitants each, while Glasgow had emerged
as the second burgh (city or town) in the land by the later seventeenth
century, with a population reckoned at 15,000 and growing. Relative to
Edinburgh and Glasgow, however, Aberdeen and Dundee were experienc-
ing stagnation in the second half of the seventeenth century. Edinburgh’s
predominance in Scottish urban life was longstanding, but Glasgow’s
new pre-eminence reflected the growing importance of developing links
to Ireland and the Atlantic economy, which were to prove so crucial to
Scottish progress after c.1740(Lynch 1989: 85–117; Devine 2000: 151–64).
The vast majority of other Scottish burghs were little more than villages
in this period. Few, apart from Inverness, Stirling, Dumfries and Ren-
frew, had more than 1,000 inhabitants each. Nevertheless, in some areas,
most notably the coastlands of the River Forth, the sheer number and
growth of small burghs created a regional urban network to rival any in
western Europe in density (Lynch 1992: 24–41). Most urban areas, how-
ever, shared a similar insecurity over time because of the high level of
their dependence upon the export of a limited range of primary prod-
ucts. This rendered Scottish towns in the early modern period especially
vulnerable to sudden fluctuations in the patterns of both supply and
demand.
Against this background, much of the thrust of modern historiogra-
phy has been to challenge the notion of the Scottish economy as periph-
eral, static and backward. Contrary to a great deal of received wisdom,
Louis Cullen argued that Scotland’s apparently ‘remote’ location off the
farnorth-west coast of Europe was a positive advantage, affording easy
access to Ireland, a land frontier with England and the possibilities for
lucrative commercial connections to the east (Cullen 1989: 226–8). By the
seventeenth century, Scots merchants, pedlars and mercenary soldiers
were to the fore in port towns across Scandinavia and the north German,
Polish and Russian hinterlands. Between 1600 and 1650 anywhere be-
tween an estimated 55,000 and 70,000 Scots had migrated across the
North Sea (Smout et al. 1994: 77–90). These movements helped to consol-
idate commercial links with Europe’s ‘inland sea’, the heart of economic
development in the north of the continent, and so provide an impetus
to urban development along Scotland’s east coast. Equally, as the centre
of economic gravity shifted south to the Amsterdam–London axis and
thence towards the Atlantic world, Scotland was also strategically well
placed. New prospects opened up for the west coast towns in supply-
ing ‘Scotland’s first colony’ in Ulster and, even before the Union of 1707,
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392 T. M. Devine
exploiting the new commercial opportunities in both America and the
Caribbean:
Scotland’s good fortune was that its most advantageous port locations on the
Clyde and on the Firth of Forth were both drawing on the same rich hinterland.
Hence the growth of the Atlantic trades reinforced the existing wealth of the
Lowlands rather than shifted its centre of gravity. The Lowlands, together with
Edinburgh and Glasgow, constituted an effective and integrated economy in
which talent and capital could be put to the best use and young men able to
venture in the western world. (Cullen 1989: 228)
In comparison, Ireland’s Atlantic commercial expansion was constrained,
not only by its colonial status but also because the hinterland of the
country’s western ports was relatively poorly developed.
Scotland’s internal economy and society have also been the subject
of more optimistic reappraisals which have collectively challenged the
notion of national stasis and inertia. The older view of a land still riven by
feud and strife has been conclusively refuted. Centralised justice took on a
new meaning with the reconstituted High Court of Justiciary in 1672 and
thecreation of the circuit courts from 1708. The revolution of 1688–9 in
Scotland was a remarkably bloodless affair while the infamous Massacre
of Glencoe of 1692 is remembered in song and story partly because, by
thenew standards of the time, the incident was an entirely exceptional
atrocity. Glencoe also illustrated the determination of the state to use its
muscle against recalcitrant Highland clans. Not surprisingly, therefore,
themilitarism of clan society was also in decline. The last clan conflict
took place in 1688, and thereafter collective violence was confined to
cattle raiding and protection rackets in some of the frontier lands of the
Highlands (Macinnes 1996: 147–8).
Atamore subtle level commercial forces were already opening up ten-
sions within clanship. Markets were developing to the south for Highland
goods: above all for cattle which, alone of most Scottish products, did very
well in the years after the Union of 1707, but also for timber, fish and
slate. The returns from these trades helped to sustain absenteeism and
consumerism among the clan elites. Household accounts show a grow-
ing appetite for elegant furniture, fashionable clothing, pictures, books
and musical instruments. The clan bards were alarmed at the trends and
lamented the habits of chiefs who spent longer periods in Edinburgh or
even in London and neglected their traditional patriarchal duties. There
were already signs that profit was starting to take precedence over the
ancient social responsibilities of the landowners. The clans expected the
ruling families to act as their protectors and guarantee secure possession
of land in return for allegiance, military service, tribute and rental. But
theevidence suggests that this social contract was already under acute
pressure in some parts of Gaeldom even before the aftermath of the
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Scotland 393
last Jacobite rebellion in 1745 which hastened the final demise of clan
society.
Throughout Scotland similar processes were at work to a greater or
lesser extent. Landowners had come to regard their estates more as as-
sets from which revenue and profit could be extracted and less as sources
of military power and authority. The indicators of this historic transition
in the priorities of the Scottish governing classes were very numerous.
It can be seen for instance in their domestic architecture. The last for-
tified house in Scotland, Leslie Castle, was built in 1660. The emphasis
was now more on comfort and aesthetic appeal rather than on defence.
The tower house was giving way to the country house. There also was
amuchgreaterinvolvementinthewider economy, with the aim of ex-
tracting better returns from the landed estate. North-eastern landowners
were heavily engaged in the seaborne grain trade to Edinburgh and the
Scandinavian countries. The great Border landlords were energetically ex-
panding the numbers of sheep and cattle on their properties. Between
1500 and the early eighteenth century, around 170 new burghs of barony
(authorised by the crown but created by lay and ecclesiastical landowners)
were founded by landowners, with the majority established in the decades
immediately before the Union. Not all – or even the majority – were a
success, but the commitment of the elite to small town and village devel-
opment is undeniable. There were also instances of large-scale investment
in harbour and port development, such as that of the Duke of Hamilton
at Bo’Ness, Sir Robert Cunninghame at Saltcoats and the Erskines of Mar
at Alloa. Not surprisingly, the new economic priorities of the elite filtered
through into the public policies of parliament and privy council which
they dominated. The records of these two bodies are full of references to
attempts made to improve the national economy. These included acts for
theencouragement of colonial trade and domestic manufacturing; the
foundation of the Bank of Scotland in 1695; the removal of the traditional
monopoly rights of the royal burghs in 1672; and a series of statutes to
facilitate agricultural improvement. Many of these initiatives were merely
fine aspirations rather than real achievements. In a sense, however, this
mattered little. What was more important was the confirmation that the
Scottish governing classes were now on the side of material progress and
lending their considerable political authority to the cause of national
economic reform.
Change and material progress can also be identified in the spheres of
agriculture, international trade and domestic industry. The first of these
wasmost crucial because of its dominant position in the economy as a
whole. Judged over the century from the 1650s to the early 1740s, Scottish
farmswere remarkably successful in feeding the population in most years
and, in some periods, producing export surpluses. Between 1660 and 1700
there were significant shortages only in 1674 and 1693–7. This last crisis
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394 T. M. Devine
has gone down in history as the ‘Lean Years’ when a series of consecu-
tive harvest failures brought about famine conditions in some areas and
effectively reduced the nation’s population by death and emigration by
an estimated 15 per cent. For some writers, however, this disaster was
an aberration, a break in the trend of increasingly stable food supplies,
caused by freak weather conditions which also hit Scandinavia and France
equally badly. For the following half-century there were difficult times,
but not subsistence crises, only in 1709, 1724–5 and 1740–1. This record
can be contrasted with the second half of the sixteenth century, when
Scotland suffered food shortages in some areas for around a third of the
years between 1560 and 1600 (Devine 1994: 2–32).
Why this improvement occurred cannot yet be precisely determined.
Some scholars argue that the decisive factor was more benign climatic
conditions; others stress the demographic factor as pressure on food sup-
ply was reduced by the mortality crises of the 1640s and 1690s and the
impact of large-scale emigration. In addition, however, there is also evi-
dence of greater efficiency in the agricultural sector, with a movement
to enlarged single tenancies, longer written leases, an expansion of rural
market centres, modest increases in grain yields in favoured areas and
commutation of rentals in kind to money values.
Parallel changes occurred in international trade. A shift was already
apparent away from Scotland’s historic commercial connections with
Europe and towards England, Ireland and the Atlantic economy. In 1700
an estimated half of Scottish trade by value was already carried on with
England in such key commodities as cattle, coal, salt, linen and grain
(Smout 1963: 194–236). Scotland’s western ports in particular were now
closely involved in commerce with the Scottish emigrant community in
thenorth of Ireland. Recent research has also identified industrial ex-
pansion in coal, lead mining, and glass and paper manufacture (Whatley
2000: 26). As many as 106 large manufactories, mainly in the towns, were
either proposed or established between 1587 and 1707, with almost 75 per
cent of these recorded after 1660. But the real industrial triumph was in
linen, a sector destined to become Scotland’s main manufacturing indus-
try for most of the eighteenth century. In 1599–1600, 18,000 ells of linen
were sent to London (an ell of linen equals 37 inches or 94 centimetres).
By 1700 the figure was around 650,000 ells, with total exports across the
Border running at between 1.2 and 1.8 million yards. The old sixteenth-
century raw material staples of skins and fish exports were now being
replaced c.1700 by linen, coal and live cattle.
What broader picture does all this reveal? First, the older orthodoxy
of a static economic system no longer fits the facts. Second, the scale of
development needs to be kept in perspective. In the critically important
agricultural sector, subsistence activity was still dominant in many ar-
eas. The estate records of the time are full of references to the large
numbers of small tenants, holding less than 20–30 acres, who rarely
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Scotland 395
produced a surplus beyond that which was necessary for family con-
sumption and landlord rents. One estimate suggests that in the first few
decades of the eighteenth century only a quarter of Scottish farmers
were mainly producing for market (Dodgshon 1981: 243; Devine 1994:
15–16). The changes identified in the rural economy were real enough
but they amounted to modest developments within the agrariansystem
rather than basic alterations to the system as a whole. Thirdly, the foun-
dations of some of the changes were hardly secure. The better times of
theperiod 1660–90 were followed by a series of disasters in the following
decade which had longer-term effects well into the first quarter of the
eighteenth century: the savage demographic and financial consequences
of the ‘Lean Years’; war with France in 1689–97 and 1701–13; rampant
economic nationalism across western Europe which inexorably squeezed
Scottish markets, not least in England, where linen duties were raised
significantly in 1698, thus contributing to a halving of Scottish exports
to thesouth between 1698–1700 and 1704–6; and last, but by no means
least, the serious financial losses associated with the failed expeditions
to Darien on the isthmus of Panama.
Finally, there is the issue of the comparison with England. The two
countries certainly had some features in common and in that sense the
‘exceptionalism’ of Scotland has been exaggerated. These included inter
alia theexistence of an agrarian social structure mainly based on land-
lords leasing farms to tenants, a geographically mobile population and
agoverning class in each country increasingly committed to national
economic advance. However, at the turn of the eighteenth century, the
contrasts were perhaps much more apparent. Scotland was undeniably
much poorer, a pattern confirmed not simply by the nation’s vulnerability
to famine but by wage data. The most recent investigations suggest that
by the1730s an English mason or carpenter had, on average, almost a 50
per cent (money wage) margin over his Scottish counterpart (Gibson and
Smout 1995: 275–6). Little wonder that Dr Johnson was later to remark
that the finest road a Scotsman ever saw led to England! Even in the later
period, 1765–95, carpenters in Aberdeen and Edinburgh never reached
more than 40–45 per cent of wages of London carpenters and nearly
two-thirds of wages in Exeter or Manchester. Mortality figures point to a
similar conclusion. Calculations of life expectancy at birth in 1755 give
figures of 31 or 32 for Scotland against 36–7 for England (Hunt 1986: 937;
Whyte 1995: 117).
Again, while Scotland may not have been significantly out of line with
other north-western European countries such as the Scandinavian states,
the nation was manifestly less developed than most of England. The in-
dustrial sector was both relatively small and suffering the joint impact
of war and rising tariffs in the early eighteenth century while, at the
same period, industry and commerce accounted for about a third of En-
glish national income (Cole 1981: 41). There was also a marked difference
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396 T. M. Devine
in the performance of agriculture, despite the advances described above
in Scottish farming in the later seventeenth century. On Scottish east
coast estates (the area most favourable to arable farming) c.1700–20,
theseed-yield figures for oats were around three to four. On a sample
of English estates the yields for the same crop were averaging 6.5 to
8.5, or double the Scottish equivalent (Holderness 1989: 143–5; Devine
1994: 55–6). Indeed current interpretations of the pattern of English
wheat yields from probate inventories indicate major gains in the sev-
enteenth and early eighteenth centuries which exceeded those of the
period after c.1760 (Daunton 1995: 30; see also chapter 4 above). In the
Scottish case these time frames would have to be reversed. Social indi-
cators tell the same story. Access to some land, however minute, was
still one of the defining characteristics of Scottish rural society until
thesecond half of the eighteenth century. Small tenants, often rent-
ing land in multiple tenure, cottars allocated a patch of land in return
forseasonal work on larger farms, and tradesmen with tiny smallhold-
ings, made up the vast majority of the country population. It was a
social order that had more in common with patterns in parts of con-
tinental Europe than the regions of commercial farming south of the
Border.
AFTER THE UNION, C .1707–60
The Parliamentary Union of 1707 was a historic watershed in Scottish
political and constitutional history but its short-term economic conse-
quences down to the 1750s are much more debatable.
Several clauses of the Act of Union were devoted to economic matters,
but Articles IV and V were the two of most importance. Article IV pro-
vided for Scottish entry without payment of custom duty to the English
domestic and colonial markets, while Article V stated that all Scottish-
owned vessels would now rank as ships of Great Britain, so affording the
Scots the privileges of inclusion within the Navigation Acts. The Union
created the biggest free-trade zone in Europe at the time and gave Scottish
merchants the liberty to trade legally in such profitable American com-
modities as tobacco, sugar, indigo and rum (a privilege not granted the
Irish) and, at the same time, afforded them the protection of the Royal
Navy. It all seemed a very good bargain. On the other hand, there was
considerable risk as well as much opportunity for Scotland in the new
relationship. The bad times of the 1690s had seriously weakened the na-
tional economy. The ‘Lean Years’ had hit agriculture so hard that, as al-
ready noted, in some areas of the Lowlands farmers were still paying off
rent arrears more than two decades later. In economic terms Scotland
wasnot in good shape and was potentially exposed to more advanced
and competitive English industry within the new common market. It
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Scotland 397
wasessentially because they recognised this danger that the last Scottish
parliament bargained hard to ensure in the Treaty of Union that Scottish-
made paper, malt and salt would continue to have a degree of protection
after the Union by being relieved of the needtopaythehigherEnglish
duties for varying periods of time. The problem was that Scotland and
England were at different stages of economic development. Scotland’s
manufacturing base was both slender and vulnerable, while English in-
dustry, especially in textiles, was already the most advanced in Europe.
The new political integration might well have doomed Scotland to the
status of an English economic satellite: a supplier of foods, raw materials
and cheap labour for the more sophisticated southern economy but with
little possibility of achieving manufacturing growth and diversification
in its own right. This was roughly what happened to Ireland in the eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries. Union could well have been the
political prelude to ‘the development of underdevelopment’ rather than
the catalyst for a new age of progress and prosperity. Why this was not
the outcome is one of the key questions of eighteenth-century Scottish
economic history (Devine 1995a: 42–3).
The first few years after 1707 showed that some of these concerns
were well founded. English competition soon crushed the finer end of
thewoollen trade, which was already in difficulties before the union.
The levying of duties on linen in 1711 and 1715 imposed an additional
handicap on Scotland’s most important manufacture. Other industries,
such as brewing and paper making, were also badly hit, though it is very
difficult to know how far this was due to the harsh winds of free trade
after the Union or to a more fundamental economic malaise that was
dragging on from earlier crisis years. Certainly there was a widespread
political consensus that the Union itself was to blame, and some of the
angry resentment that was generated spilled over into support for the
Jacobite rising of 1715. The Scots were also taxed more highly, with some
of the new impositions being in breach of the Treaty of Union itself. In
addition to linen, taxes rose on salt in 1711 and, most notoriously of all,
on malt in 1725. These were basic articles of life, and it is not surprising
that the increases on them produced a furious political response, includ-
ing serious urban rioting in Glasgow in 1725. Yet, in the long run, tax-
ation hardly drained Scotland dry. Modern estimates suggest only about
15–20 per cent of tax revenue actually left the country in the five decades
after 1707 (Devine 1995: 43). Taxes went up, but apparently most of the
additional revenue was still spent on civil and military expenditure in
Scotland itself.
It is also difficult to gauge the real effect of what could have been one
particularly damaging post-Union development. Increasingly, the Scot-
tish aristocracy and a few of the greater lairds (landowners) sought
political opportunity, social position and family influence in London
by setting up residence in the capital during the winter months. This
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398 T. M. Devine
absenteeism was not entirely new; it had already started before the Union
and became greater after it. From one perspective the temporary migra-
tion of the Scots nobility could be regarded as a flight of capital, as
aristocratic rentals were increasingly exported to the south to sustain
opulent lifestyles in polite English society. Indeed, absenteeism almost
certainly forced rents up because, as the duke of Montrose complained
in 1708, ‘London journeys don’t verie well agree with Scots estates’ (Camp-
bell 1977: 206). On the other hand, there was also a positive side: the need
formore revenue generated in the longer term a search for improved agri-
cultural practices, since a prime determinant of agrarian improvement
wasthe pressure on the Scottish landed class to extract more revenue
from their estates in order to support a higher standard of life.
Moreover, after these early difficult years some Scots merchants were
beginning to exploit the new free-trade opportunities. Grain and meal
exports more than doubled between the periods 1707–12 and 1717–22
and, as commercialisation intensified, protests against meal exports be-
came more violent in some parts of the Lowlands (Whatley 2000: 53–4). In
large part this may have been due to the extension of export bounties on
grain after the Union. The so-called Levellers Revolt in Galloway in 1724
started when small tenants in the south-west protested bitterly against
thelarge-scale cattle enclosures which were being built to secure more
benefit from English demands for stock. These popular disturbances were
one important sign that the post-Union market was beginning to have an
impact in some regions. Indeed, by the 1720s and 1730s the effect may
have been more general. Recent research on the Lowland rural economy
in these decades suggests that many of the estates studied were gearing
their output of grain and cattle much more to the market. This is indi-
cated by an accelerated movement towards larger single tenancies and
the sustained conversion of payment of rentals in kind to money values
(Devine 1994: 20–32). In the long run also, one of the key advantages
of the Union was that Scots merchants were able to trade legally with
theEnglish tobacco colonies of Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina.
Even if the golden age of the Clyde tobacco trade lay some years in
the future, there was already some evidence of dynamic enterprise by
Glasgow merchants in the 1710s and 1720s. By the early 1720s the Scots
had captured around 15 per cent of the legal trade in American tobacco to
Britain, while smuggling on a large scale had become a national growth
industry.
Thus both the prophets of doom and the optimists were proven wrong
as the Union relationship entered it third decade. The nation’s economy
was not in ruins; indeed, there had been some modest recovery from the
miseries of the 1690s in such sectors as agriculture and overseas trade. On
theother hand, the economic miracle enthusiastically predicted by some
pro-Union propagandists had manifestly not taken place. In structural
termsthe economy in 1750 differed little from that of 1700: economic
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Scotland 399
expansion tended to develop slowly and in accordance with established
patterns.
TRANSFORMATION, C .1760–1860
The principal thrust of the analysis to this point has been to stress the
significant material advances in Scotland between the mid-seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries which took place within an existing economic
and social framework. Despite urban and industrial growth, Scotland re-
mained an overwhelmingly rural-based society, with only one Scot in
eight living in towns defined as communities of 4,000 or more inhab-
itants in c.1750. This traditional pattern, of basic continuity marked
by change at the margins, ended abruptly from the 1760s. From then
Scotland began to experience a social and economic transformation un-
paralleled in the Europe of the time in its speed, scale and intensity.
The currently favoured view of English modernisation in the eighteenth
century as a process characterised by cumulative, protracted and evo-
lutionary development does not fit the experience north of the Border
(Crafts 1985; Mokyr 1993).
There the onset of radical and revolutionary change was distinguished
by several key features. First, the rate of expansion of the industrial sector
wasvery significant. Between the 1770s and 1790s cotton had overtaken
linen as Scotland’s premier manufacture. By 1788 Scotland had nineteen
of Britain’s 143 water powered mills, in 1810 110 and by 1839 192, by
which date the capital value of the industry was around £4.5 million. At
the sametime, however, linen maintained a sustained expansion, espe-
cially in Angus, Fife and Perth. Linen output tripled in volume between
1773–7 and 1813–17, to reach an annual average of 26.6 million yards.
Exports of linen cloth in the later period stood at 44 million yards in
1831 but had risen to 79 million in 1845. Woollen hosiery production
concentrated in the Borders (where it was insignificant in the 1790s) and
parts of the Central Lowlands. By the 1840s it comprised a quarter of the
UK’s output in this sector and had effectively overtaken the west of Eng-
land in the fine woollen trade. The associated success in textile finishing
wassymbolised by the construction of the St Rollox works in Glasgow in
1799 for manufacturing bleaching powder. By the 1830s it had become
the largest heavy chemical plant in Europe.
Brewing, distilling, paper making and coal mining also all recorded
substantial increases in output, but before 1830 textiles were dominant.
One knowledgeable contemporary, Sir John Sinclair, estimated that, in
theearly nineteenth century, cotton, wool, linen and silk accounted for
nearly 90 per cent of all Scottish manufacturing employment. By contrast,
iron making experienced relatively slow growth, with no new works being
built after an initial phase of expansion (from the opening of the famous
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400 T. M. Devine
Carron Iron Works in 1759 to 1801) until the 1830s. In that decade, how-
ever, metal manufacture started to come into its own as the central dy-
namic in the industrial system, ironically when cotton was experiencing
increasingly acute difficulties in external markets. Scottish output of pig
iron, which stood at some 37,500 tons in 1830, had shot up to 700,000
tons by 1849, with the Scottish share of British output rising from 5 to 25
per cent. A new industrial complex now emerged with deep linkages be-
tween iron making, coal mining, engineering, railway construction and
shipbuilding, all of which fashioned the characteristic Scottish manu-
facturing structure from this period until well into the twentieth cen-
tury. Capital raised by Scottish railway companies was a mere £150,000
in 1830 but by 1870 had risen to a massive £47 million. Clyde shipbuild-
ing experienced its major phase of global dominance after c. 1870 but
theremarkably strong connections between the west of Scotland metal
industries and ship construction were already in place in mid-century,
with the Clyde yards accounting for two-thirds of all British iron tonnage
launched between 1851 and 1870 (Whatley 1997: 18–37).
As a direct consequence of the burgeoning manufacturing economy,
radical changes took place in Scotland’s traditional employment struc-
ture. Indeed, it is possible to argue on the basis of this evidence that
Scotland had quickly become more industrialised than the rest of Britain.
In 1851 43.2 per cent of the employed workforce in Scotland were occu-
pied in industry, compared to a British figure of 40.9 per cent (Lee 1979).
Adecade earlier, at the 1841 census, a small majority of the Scottish
people, 52 per cent, lived in urban-industrial parishes and no Lowland
county had a majority of householders engaged in farming. All this was
unambiguous evidence of the speed of structural transformation over the
previous few decades.
The national pattern of population distribution was recast in dramatic
fashion and the rate of internal mobility was extraordinary. In the 1860s
many areas of Scotland were losing people, especially in the Highlands,
theeastern counties from Moray to Berwick and parts of the far south-
west.Only the textile towns of the Borders and the industrial counties of
theCentral Lowlands were experiencing significant levels of inward mi-
gration. It was these areas, too, which drew the Irish, Scotland’s largest
immigrant group of modern times. By the 1850s there were around a
quarter of a million Irish-born, or 7 per cent of the total national popu-
lation, more than twice the proportion for England (Devine 1990).
As a direct corollary of the last point, the speed and extent of urban
expansion should be noted. In a league of European ‘urbanised societies’
(as measured by the proportion of total population inhabiting towns of
10,000 or more) Scotland was tenth in 1700, seventh in the 1750s, fourth
in 1800 and second only to England and Wales in 1850. In the first three
decades of the nineteenth century, the rate of growth of Glasgow was
reckoned the fastest of any town of its size in western Europe (de Vries
1984: 39–48). The colossus of Scottish urban growth (the number of its
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