This collection of essays is the result of a major conference focusing specifically on the role of Scotland’s print culture in shaping the literature and politics of the long eighteenth century. In contrast to previous studies, this work treats Blackwood’s Magazine as the culmination of a long tradition rather than a starting point.

The Price of Scotland covers a well-known episode in Scottish history, the ill-fated Darien Scheme. It recounts for the first time in almost forty years, the history of the Company of Scotland, looking at previously unexamined evidence and considering the failure in light of the Company's financial records. Douglas Watt offers the reader a new way of looking at this key moment in history, from the attempt to raise capital in London in 1695 through to the shareholder bail-out as part of the Treaty of Union in 1707. With the tercentenary of the Union in May 2007, The Price of Scotland provides a timely reassessment of this national disaster. REVIEWS Douglas Watt has brought an economist's eye and poet's sensibility in the Price of Scotland... to show definitively... that over-ambition and mismanagement, rather than English mendacity, doomed Scotland's imperial ambitions. - THE OBSERVER The Price of Scotland treats Darien as a financial mania. - THE FINANCIAL TIMES Exceptionally well written, it reads like a novel. As I say - if you're not Scottish and live here - read it. If you're Scottish read it anyway. It's a very, very good book. - i-on magazine The must-have book on the events in advance of the Act of Union that brought Scotland and England together in 1707 is Douglas Watt's The Price of Scotland. It's a fantastic run-through of the "catastrophic failure" of the Darien Scheme - the creation of the Company of Scotland to establish a Central American colony. THE FINANCIAL TIMES

Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World presents a new interpretation of the development of the English East India Company between 1660 and 1720. The book explores the connections between scholarship, patronage, diplomacy, trade, and colonial settlement in the early modern world. Links of patronage between cosmopolitan writers and collectors and scholars associated with the Royal Society of London and the universities are investigated. Winterbottom shows how innovative works of scholarship – covering natural history, ethnography, theology, linguistics, medicine, and agriculture - were created amid multi-directional struggles for supremacy in Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The role of non-elite actors including slaves in transferring knowledge and skills between settlements is explored in detail.

This volume reveals the extraordinary range of Daniel Defoe's intellectual interests. Three volumes are devoted to major historical writings by Defoe. His "Memoirs of the Church of Scotland" and "History of the Union of Great Britain" are included here.

The Anglo-Scottish union crisis is used to demonstrate the growing influence of popular opinion in this period.

In 1669, fleeing a London decimated by the plague and the Great Fire, a young English child arrived, alone, at Fort St. George, the first English fortress in Mughal India. The boy survived to become a maverick merchant-mariner, an ‘independent’ trading on the fringes of the East India Company. Captain Thomas Bowrey gained renown in numerous fields. Operating throughout the East Indies and speaking Malay, the lingua franca of diplomacy and trade in the region, he would write and publish the first ever Malay-English dictionary, a seminal work that even a century later would be used by the likes of Thomas Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore. It has also been claimed Bowrey wrote the earliest first-hand account of the recreational use of cannabis. Bowrey’s shipping interests, however, were plagued by pirates, privateers and mutiny and included the tragic Worcester, which played a pivotal role in the union of England and Scotland. Subsequent projects included the east African slave trade and his collaboration with Daniel Defoe in the founding of the South Sea Company. Despite everything, Bowrey succeeded in amassing sufficient fortune for alms-houses to be built in his name following his death, but his true legacy is his papers that lay hidden in an attic for two centuries and which now shed light not only on the exploits of this remarkable man but also on life and commerce at the start of globalisation.