This second revised and expanded edition of the bestselling Integration
and Enlightenment provides a compact survey of developments in
Enlightenment Scotland, from the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite
rebellion to the Scottish Reform Act of 1832. The Act spelled the end of
political and social systems that had presided over industrial and
agricultural revolutions turning Scotland from a rural society to one of
the most urbanised and industrialised of European nations. Scotland also
moved from an being simply an active participant in the cultural life of
western Europe to being a leader in a new, more expansive, Atlantic and
European world where the ideas of its great Enlightenment thinkers
circulated from Moscow to Philadelphia.The political framework for
changes was the Union of 1707 which incorporated Scotland into the
United Kingdom of Great Britain, and after 1800 Great Britain and
Ireland. However, within the UK a distinctive political system run for
most of this period by either the Dukes of Argyll or the so-called
'Dundas Despotism' dominated Scotland. This volume studies how that
system first stimulated and exploited cultural and economic change and
then was finally destroyed by it.