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The city and trade
The technologies of metal-working and the Protestant ethic of “work hard and save money” were important foundations of the Industrial Revolution. There were, of course, more to come.
The soclal organisation of the cities began to rival the feudal society of life on the land. The cities and would eventually triumph, even though they were often no larger than the small towns of today. Feudalism was undermined when plague spread throughout Europe with the Black Death of the 1340s and the population was reduced significantly. There was a rapid fall in the supply of people to work on the land and in the manorial houses. This resulted in successful demands for higher wages and, in the case of serfs and villains, some kind of freedom. A labour market was opening up. In turn, this affected the nature of agriculture, which began to turn away from social structures and become more of a “business”, supplying merchants in the cities. Even the peasant could produce a surplus for the market. If not ready for the Industrial Revolution yet, Europe entered a period of new beginnings – the Renaissance.
The medieval cities provided new opportunities for developments in technology and the arts. Craft guilds emerged. As well as self-regulation of their trades, they allowed innovation with skills and materials and provide training centred around small workshops, often clustered in a particular “quarter” of the city.
1695 the Bank of Scotland was founded with the help of William Paterson in Edinburgh. Flushed with his earlier success in founding the Bank of England a few years earlier, Paterson had travelled to the Americas. He became beguiled by travellers' tales of Darien, a wonderful land on the Isthmus of Panama, as told to him by a sailor he met in a bar in London. Returning to Edinburgh, Paterson persuaded the Scottish government that Scotland should not be left behind in establishing colonies in the New World. Unfortunately, England, France and Spain were already fighting over the best bits, so Patterson used his “insider knowledge” to recommend Panama as the place most likely to to provide Scotland with its colonial base. The resulting expedition to “New Caledonia” was both a personal disaster for Patterson, and ultimately a national one. Analysts have estimated that up to a quarter of the money in circulation in Scotland was lost in trying to claim the Central American swamps. Many families lost their life savings. Scotland, first in so many technological advances, had the dubious privilege of being the first nation state to go bust, and was bailed out by the London government through the Act of Union of 1707.
It was probably events like this that led Burns to describe some of his compatriots as “a parcel o' rogues”. It was an eerie parallel with the great banking crisis of 2008, when a similar venture, this time into the virtual swamps of the global financial markets, was to bring down the two major Edinburgh banks, leading to a bail-out by UK taxpayers. (At the time of writing, there is no equivalent to the Act of Union on the horizon.)
The new British Empire was on the rise, with international trade leading to the growth of the great mercantile cities of Liverpool and Glasgow, with tobacco and slavery as early benefactors. We also saw the sucess of our east coast ports such as Hull, with the wool trade providing much of the early investment, as it did in the west. With the arrival of Empire, the textile trade would specialise with cotton in Glasgow and Liverpool and jute in Dundee.
The Jacobite uprising of 1745 was another poorly-led venture to get control of the inexhaustible riches. It finished with the defeat of the Catholics and the French, together with their Scottish supporters at the last military battle fought in our region.
The East West split of Highlands versus Lallands was a marked feature of whether Scots chose to favour Bonnie Prince Charlie or King George’s army led by his son The Duke of Cumberland - still known as "Bloody Cumberland" in Scotland (or "Butcher Cumberland" in polite English society and school textbooks) - who was supported at Culloden’s final victory by many lowland regiments.
The rebellion started in north-west Scotland, and had enough momentum to get as far south as Derby. (In the 1970's an old Derbyshire man told me that he called all Yorkshiremen “scotch rogues”, because some of their ancestors came south with Bonny Prince Charlie). The '45 belonged to an earlier time, Trade was the uprising, and Trade would eventually win.
In spite of being one of the poorer countries in Europe, by 1750 the Scots developed an advanced public education system, part-funded by taxation and the Kirk. With its roots now firmly established, it was to flower as the Age of Reason - the Enlightenment – in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Philosophers such as David Hume reflected on human nature and reasoning, laying the way for widespread application of scientific methods. Adam Smith presented economics as a discipline for the first time and grappled with the underlying philosophy. James Hutton developed the science of geology, and was one of the first to speculate on evolution by natural selection. Writers such as Robert Burns reflected upon human values and a fair society.
Rejecting much of the religious dogma and received wisdom of the time, these free-thinkers looked at life from a humanist, as opposed to a superstitious, point of view. The old orders of politics and trade were questioned and changes proposed, authority itself was challenged. Although this was happening all over Europe, here the emphasis was on an empirical approach, where the world was to be observed closely and progress made by showing what worked.
Alternative Empire?
“What got created - for a brief, dazzling generation during the first quarter of the 19th century - was a non-English British Indian government; perhaps the best the British ever made in Asia. Virtually all of its stars were Scots, Irish or Welsh. The most phenomenally knowledgeable and culturally tolerant of them were Scots like Sir Thomas Munro, Sir John Malcolm and Mountstuart Elphinstone, and a little later James Thomason in the northwest provinces. All took to India the lessons of the Scottish enlightenment, especially the budding sociology of Adam Ferguson and John Millar, in which wise public action had to be grounded on deep local understanding. It was, in fact, just because so many of them felt that English government had so misunderstood and so mistreated their own country that as Britons they were determined not to repeat the mistake in Asia. Many of them became authorities on the minutiae of the history, law and agrarian economics of the territories under their rule.
"To act effectively meant knowing in depth the states and societies with which one was dealing. So Malcolm wrote extensively on the Sikhs, and published The History of Persia (1815). Elphinstone, who had fought with the Maratha princes, produced the encyclopedic Report on the Territories Conquered from the Paishwa (1821). And those writings were often strikingly free of the stereotypes about 'anarchy' that coloured the work of the later Victorians. Elphinstone was at pains to portray Mughal rule as a golden age of peaceful relations between Muslims and Hindus. “
Simon Schama “A History of Britain” Vol 3
Looking back, it is easy to underestimate the freshness of the thinking and the considerable impact that these ideas have had on our cities of today. Their ideas may still be the subject of intense debate, but it is easy to forget that they were dreamed up an a very different society than the one that we live in. Much of our world was foreseen by the enlightenment writers. I wonder what they would write if we could bring them back today, so they could see what has worked, and what has not, and look again with their keen eyes at the sprawl of modern civilisation.
For those (particularly the Glaswegians) who see the work of Francis Hutcheson as its initiator, our northern branch of the Enlightenment had its beginnings at Glasgow University. But it was in Edinburgh that the city itself began to function as a university, such was the concentration of talent. Having failed in the Darien venture, Edinburgh was now to export its ideas across the world, with phenomenal success.