Historians of early modern finance have frequently cited the “Financial Revolution” that took place in England and Scotland in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a defining moment in the move towards modernity. The emergence of the Bank of England, the National Debt, and the need for regular grants of taxation provided many of the institutions that exist today. Works by scholars such as John Brewer and Julian Hoppit are frequently vaunted as benchmark studies into the English financial revolution. However, there have been no studies into the financial revolution in Scotland. Andrew McDiarmid’s book addresses this absence and provides some interesting insights into the financial history of early eighteenth-century Scotland.

The financial revolution in Scotland, according to McDiarmid, was driven by the growth of private, rather than public credit. This approach draws heavily on Patrick Walsh’s work on the South Sea Bubble in Scotland, and the book’s eight chapters, including the introduction and conclusion, use a variety of case studies to demonstrate this point. After McDiarmid outlines his case in the introduction, chapter 2 provides a solid narrative of the financial revolution in Scotland between the revolution of 1688–90 and the Anglo-Scottish Union in 1707. Chapter 3 addresses the land bank debates in Scotland, England, and North America between 1650 and 1705, and chapter 4 uses the example of William Burnet to investigate the role of Scottish banking in the American colonies. Chapter 5 looks at the character of John Law and his alleged role in creating the proposed National Bank of France between 1701 and 1702. Chapters 6 and 7 examine the growth of Scottish financial institutions after 1707, and the conclusion attempts to set Scotland’s financial revolution in the wider history of the eighteenth century.

There is a lot to admire in McDiarmid’s study. He has provided some welcome insights into a topic that has long deserved an investigation, and the book has opened future avenues for scholars to explore Scotland's financial history. However, the book is quite limited, and readers who open the book looking for a Scottish equivalent to Brewer and Hoppit’s work will not find the same level of analysis. McDiarmid is selective in the examples that he focuses on, and there is a lot more that he could have said to create a stronger study. Although McDiarmid is correct that the Scottish state did not experience the same fiscal growth after 1689 compared to its English counterpart, he does not adequately investigate the financial developments that did occur in the Scottish state. Regular parliamentary sessions providing substantial grants of taxation, as Brewer has shown, were a key part of the financial revolution in England. A similar, albeit limited, process occurred in Scotland after 1689, but McDiarmid’s decision not to address this limits the book’s scope.

The case studies that McDiarmid focuses on in the book’s chapters also come across as cherry-picked. His chapters on William Burnet and John Law do provide some welcome insights, but at times they come across as narrative and irrelevant to the book’s theme of the financial revolution in Scotland. There is a lot more discussion about what happened outside of Scotland rather than within it. Furthermore, many of McDiarmid’s points on the role of land banks (44–6) have been long established in the scholarship, and his analysis at times suggests that he is pointing to how the Scots contributed to this pattern rather than providing a fresh analysis. The chapters are also noticeably short, and readers may get the impression that more work was needed to flesh out McDiarmid’s originality and ideas more fully.

The book also suffers from multiple syntax, copyediting, and typographical errors. There were numerous instances where spacebars were not inserted into some sentences (87, 93), placenames were spelled incorrectly, with The Hague being referred to as “the Hauge” in one instance (65), and there were several typesetting issues (95). While this comment may come across as petty, for a book that costs such a substantial amount of money, readers should not find such obvious and basic mistakes. There are also some chronological errors in the book. For example, in chapter 6, McDiarmid implies that Robert Harley was Earl of Oxford in 1704 (108). Harley was not offered a peerage until 1711, and issues like these make the book inconsistent in certain parts.

This also applies to the book’s stylistic conventions, such as the decision in chapter 7 suddenly to refer to the Royal Bank of Scotland as RBS (the current abbreviation for the bank). It is highly unlikely that eighteenth-century Scots referred to the institution as RBS, and the author’s decision to abbreviate the bank’s name, along with the Bank of England and Bank of Scotland, further makes the reader think that more work was needed in the editing stages. This is also evident in the author’s prose. McDiarmid frequently relies on throwaway phrases to introduce points and often engages in tangential, and sometimes irrelevant, discussions that make it hard to glean what his argument is. For example, in chapter 6, McDiarmid begins a section with the expression “Legend has it” and then provides a sweeping summary of Jacobitism that is an odd fit for the book’s penultimate chapter (105). There are numerous instances of this throughout the book, and it would have been better if the author provided more focused and clear analysis rather than a vague narrative that relies too much on purple prose. There is too much focus in the book on what could have been, rather than on what happened. Overall, this is a book that will be useful for future scholars, but the author could have done more work to provide a stronger study.