The Scottish Enlightenment was a Lowlands phenomenon, centered on the cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. But it occurred in close proximity to the rural hinterland of the Highlands, which enlightened intellectuals regarded with a mixture of idealization and apprehension. To Lowlanders, the mountains were a place of primitive subsistence, untouched by learning or commerce. But when the Highlands clans rose up in violent rebellion in the Jacobite uprising of 1745, the region seemed to demand urgent attention and deliberate measures of improvement. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson's book discusses the period from 1750 to 1820, from the first floating of paternalistic schemes to improve Highland agriculture, in the immediate aftermath of the 1745 uprising, to the point where people became aware of the limits to development and began to encourage large-scale emigration.

Jonsson begins in the Select Society of Edinburgh in the 1750s, with the judge James Burnet (Lord Monboddo) and the Presbyterian minister Robert Wallace hailing the simplicity of the Highland way of life. For these writers, small-scale farms, cultivated by the spade rather than the plough, were nurseries of martial virtue, producing Gaelic soldiers who could serve the British Empire. The ideal was applied by Lord Kames and others to the management of estates confiscated from the Jacobite rebels. It was given literary expression in James Macpherson's purported translations of the poems of Ossian, published in the early 1760s. Measures to encourage fisheries, kelp farming, and even cottage industries were made consistent with this pastoral vision. In contrast, there were Scottish thinkers who saw the development of commerce as necessary to Highland progress. They advocated the extension of sheep farming into the uplands and the cultivation of timber for shipbuilding, and they accepted that the consequence would be displacement of the rural population.

The debates took a more somber turn in the 1790s, when war with France and the curtailment of international trade led to food shortages and anxieties about the limits of mineral resources. Writers such as the novelist Henry Mackenzie and the Edinburgh natural history professor John Walker continued to praise the moral benefits of small-scale agriculture in the Highlands. But T. R. Malthus's notorious essay of 1798 cast doubt on whether natural resources could ever keep up with the growth of the rural population. When the Peace of Amiens opened the door to colonial emigration, liberal writers such as Francis Horner and Thomas Douglas were all for it. In their view, the Highlands had reached its carrying capacity; subsistence farmers should seek their fortunes overseas and make way for grazing sheep.

Jonsson's history is essentially one of intellectual debate, but he also has a sharp eye for the material conditions of Highland life. He doesn't spare his readers the details, regaling them with information about peat cutting, spade cultivation, sheep breeding, and many other topics. At the same time, he keeps in view the wider domain within which ideas circulated. Proposals for commercial development were shaped by the economic thought of Adam Smith and his followers, whose discussions ranged over trade with North America and the causes of famine in India. Natural history, in the wake of Carolus Linnaeus, was also increasingly shaped by a global perspective. Jonsson follows the lead of several historians of science, who have shown how Linnaean natural history cast its net over the whole world while endorsing a kind of cameralism at home. It sponsored projects to exploit the economic potential of native plant species while experimenting with exotic transplants from elsewhere. Along these lines, Professor John Hope tried to cultivate rhubarb and tea plants in the botanical gardens in Edinburgh, believing they would eventually adapt to the unforgiving Scottish climate.

Jonsson's study is richly detailed and thoroughly documented; many of his endnotes are mini bibliographical essays in themselves. At the same time, he advances a large claim for its significance in relation to “the origins of environmentalism,” though he spends relatively little time justifying this. He is aware, of course, that similar claims have been put forward on behalf of different times and places, and he doesn't deny their right to a hearing. What he has done is to add substantially to the case that the eighteenth-century Enlightenment contributed crucial elements to modern environmental thinking. He points to the notion of a balance of nature, prominent in both scientific and economic theories in the period. He traces Scottish thinkers' dawning awareness of the limits of natural resources as they reflected on the Highlands. And he shows how Smithian liberalism continued to encounter serious moral criticism as a purported answer to the region's problems. All of these themes feature in contemporary environmentalist thought, and to that degree, Jonsson has demonstrated the importance of eighteenth-century Scotland in its genealogy. His learned and lucidly written book will draw other scholars' attention to the period when enlightened Scots looked northward with a mixture of nostalgia, puzzlement, and trepidation.