The new work by Neil Davidson, the author of The Origins of Scottish Nationhood, is an unabashedly Marxist view of a critical period in Scottish history, the period of transformation between the Williamite Settlement in Scotland and the Battle of Culloden. For Davidson, this bourgeois revolution set the stage for Scotland's incorporation into the imperial British economy and launch into the industrial revolution. Although thought provoking and insightful, Davidson's insistent shoehorning of early eighteenth-century Scotland into an economic analysis often fails to see the trees for the forest.

The real strength and usefulness of this work is in Davidson's comprehension and careful explanations of Scotland's elaborate systems of government and society. In lucid, easily understood sections, he sets out the workings of the Church of Scotland, the Scottish courts and their jurisdictions, and the pre-Union Scottish Parliament. When Davidson moves away from his focus, his sensitive reading of the period comes through, as in the delightful explanation of his choice for the book's cover art and its symbolic meaning for Hanoverian and Whig political factions.

One of the major problems with the work is that although Davidson has read widely in secondary and printed primary sources, he fails to scratch the surface of rich collections of primary archival material relevant to the case. Many of the primary collections he cites were assembled in the mid- to late nineteenth century, and their editors had biases reflected in the collections. In a glaring case of this getting in the way, Davidson chooses to use an anonymous memo endorsing the separation of the 1715 Jacobite prisoners into categories and punishing them separately—not only is this document not anonymous if the whole document file is read (the authorship is obvious), but far better material is available from Sir David Dalrymple and Duncan Forbes.

This analysis also misses the complexity of Scottish society in this era, a problem made worse by the reliance on printed source material. Davidson characterizes Sir John Clerk of Penucuick as a harsh mine owner on the basis of a printed list of rules for the mine, rather than search the easily available Clerk correspondence to see if these rules were ever employed as written. Many Scots simply do not fit into a simple category of their economic status, political loyalty, or religious belief, no matter how hard Davidson wishes to pound them; a more nuanced reading of shifting ties of family, political, and class loyalty would be far more realistic. Almost any letter between the duke of Montrose and his factor, Gorthie, reveals not just Montrose as feudal landlord and enterprising capitalist but also Gorthie as loyal subordinate gentry and small-time stock investor, often in the same sentence.

Additionally, Davidson chooses to use as examples of economic transformation anecdotes from Walter Scott novels written nearly a century after the fact, rather than find contemporary cases. As examples of how the early nineteenth century viewed the transformation, these anecdotes are illuminating, but they are not a replacement for primary material.

Despite having cited recent works on Jacobitism, Davidson has not taken in their far more complex reading of the movement. Instead, he insists on using it as a counterrevolutionary phenomenon, a stance that makes men like Lockhart of Carnwath stand out in sharp relief. At one point, Davidson challenges Jacobite historians to produce more than Lockhart as an example of these atypical Jacobites who were also investors and reformers. To keep to his own limits on sources, Ramsey's Scotland and Scotsmen in the eighteenth century provides two: Mackintosh of Borlum, who wrote an enclosure pamphlet in prison, and Erskine of Alva, who spent heavily on investments in clover, enclosure, and mining.

For specialists in the early eighteenth century, this book is a new lens through which to view a complex and fascinating period, and it will likely inspire fresh insights on the Union and institutions like the Bank of Scotland. For nonspecialists, however, the single-mindedness of Davidson's framework blunts much of his writing and makes this book material for modern Scottish political debate rather than study of the eighteenth century.