The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas. In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. The Enlightenment and the Book seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as The Wealth of Nations and The Life of Samuel Johnson were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits. The Enlightenment and the Book explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.

This collection of essays explores the role played by imaginative writing in the Scottish Enlightenment and its interaction with the values and activities of that movement. Across a broad range of areas via specially commissioned essays by experts in each field, the volume examines the reciprocal traffic between the groundbreaking intellectual project of eighteenth-century Scotland and the imaginative literature of the period, demonstrating that the innovations made by the Scottish literati laid the foundations for developments in imaginative writing in Scotland and further afield. In doing so, it provide a context for the widespread revaluation of the literary culture of the Scottish Enlightenment and the part that culture played in the project of Enlightenment.

Women are shown to have played an important and very visible role in society at the time. Fashionable "polite" society of this period emphasised mixed-gender sociability and encouraged the visible participation of elite women in a series of urban, often public settings. Using a variety of sources (both men's and women's correspondence, accounts, bills, memoirs and other family papers), this book investigates the ways in which polite social practices and expectations influenced the experience of elite femininity in Scotland in the eighteenth century. It explores women's education and upbringing; their reading practices; the meanings of the social spaces and activities in which they engaged and how this fed over into the realm of politics; and the fashion for tourism at home and abroad. It also asks how elite women used polite social spaces and practices to extend their mental horizons and to form a sense of belonging to a public at a time when Scotland was among the most intellectually vibrant societies in Europe.

DIVEnlightenment’s Frontier is the first book to investigate the environmental roots of the Scottish Enlightenment. What was the place of the natural world in Adam Smith’s famous defense of free trade? Fredrik Albritton Jonsson recovers the forgotten networks of improvers and natural historians that sought to transform the soil, plants, and climate of Scotland in the eighteenth century. The Highlands offered a vast outdoor laboratory for rival liberal and conservative views of nature and society. But when the improvement schemes foundered toward the end of the century, northern Scotland instead became a crucible for anxieties about overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and the physical limits to economic growth. In this way, the rise and fall of the Enlightenment in the Highlands sheds new light on the origins of environmentalism./div

The History begins with the first full-scale critical consideration of Scotland's earliest literature, drawn from the diverse cultures and languages of its early peoples. The first volume covers the literature produced during the medieval and early modern period in Scotland, surveying the riches of Scottish work in Gaelic, Welsh, Old Norse, Old English and Old French, as well as in Latin and Scots. New scholarship is brought to bear, not only on imaginative literature, but also law, politics, theology and philosophy, all placed in the context of the evolution of Scotland's geography, history, languages and material cultures from our earliest times up to 1707.

This volume in the new history of Scottish philosophy covers the Scottish philosophical tradition as it developed over the eighteenth century.

This study of poet Robert Burns's politics uncovers the intellectual context of the poet's political radicalism. Burns is revealed as a sophisticated political poet whose work draws on the democratic, contractarian ideology of Scottish Presbyterianism; the English and Irish Real Whig tradition; and the political theory of the Scottish Enlightenment. Casting new light on the poet's education and his early reading, this book provides detailed new readings of Burns's major poems and offers research on his links with Irish poets and radicals, providing a major reinterpretation of the man who is coming to be recognized as the poet laureate of the radical Enlightenment.

Livesey traces the origins of the modern conceptions of civil society to Ireland & Scotland during the 18th century, arguing that it was invented as an idea of renewed community for provincial & defeated élites to allow them to enjoy liberty without participating in governance.

At the summit of his power, John Law was the most famous man in Europe. Born in Scotland in 1671, he was convicted of murder in London and, after his escape from prison, fled Scotland for the mainland when Union with England brought with it a warrant for his arrest. On the continent he lurched from one money-making scheme to the next - selling insurance against losing lottery tickets in Holland, advising the Duke of Savoy - amassing a fortune of some £80,000. But for his next trick he had grander ambitions. When Louis XIV died, leaving a thoroughly bankrupt France to his five-year-old heir, Law gained the ear of the Regent, Philippe D'Orleans. In the years that followed, Law's financial wizardry transformed the fortunes of France, enriching speculators and investors across the continent, and he was made Controller-General of Finances, effectively becoming the French Prime Minister. But the fall from grace that was to follow was every bit as spectacular as his meteoric rise. John Law, by a biographer of Adam Smith and the author of Frozen Desire and Capital of the Mind, dramatises the life of one of the most inventive financiers in history, a man who was born before his time and in whose day the word millionaire came to be coined.