Bob Harris and the late Charles McKean have written an extraordinary book. From the title, one might expect a study of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen during the prime years of the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet this book pays almost no attention to those towns or to the enlightened ideas and intellectuals they nurtured. Rather, it “focuses on a cross section of towns from across Scotland, around thirty in total, that almost never feature in modern discussions of urbanization” (2). They range from fast-growing, mostly industrializing towns, such as Dundee, Paisley, Greenock, and Perth, which had populations that exceeded 10,000 for most of this period, to midsize burghs with 5,000–10,000 inhabitants by the end of the eighteenth century, such as Ayr, Kilmarnock, Dumfries, Stirling, Inverness, Montrose, and Dunfermline, and finally to a larger number of smaller towns with populations under (often well under) 5,000, such as Banff, Cupar, Haddington, Hawick, and Wigtown. Sometimes the commentary extends even beyond the featured thirty towns, to include, for example, Peterhead in the far northeast. To discover unifying patterns among so many demographically, geographically, economically, socially, and culturally diverse entities, to contrast those patterns with the corresponding ones in England during the same period, and to do this across a wide variety of topics, with due regard for individual variations and change over time, seems an impossibly ambitious task for one volume to accomplish, and it probably is. The book is not without flaws, some of which will be mentioned below. But as a whole it rises above them by drawing upon a rich array of archival resources, presenting an astonishing assortment of images, synthesizing vast amounts of information that cuts across academic disciplines, and breaking new ground all over the urban landscape. With 149 black and white illustrations, 37 color plates on photographic paper, 8 maps, and 31 tables, it is a magnificent piece of bookmaking.

Harris and McKean are at their best when portraying quantitative and qualitative configurations in the built environment and linking them to urban “improvement.” We learn that urban improvement during this period sometimes had less to do with new building than with clearing out ancient clutter from the main streets. One map shows the dates when seventeen Scottish towns removed their street-blocking mercat (market) crosses, accompanied by a photograph of the surviving mercat cross that was removed from the High Street in Forfar in 1799. Another map shows the dates when a variety of towns removed their ports (gates), accompanied by a nineteenth-century drawing of a port in Dundee. This “repair and refurbishment” phase of improvement steadily gave way to “an agenda for change focused on circulation, amenity and visual aggrandizement” (104). There are maps showing the dates that selected burghs constructed new fleshmarkets farther from city centers (accompanied, of course, by the removal of old ones), instituted street lighting using oil lamps, built Freemasonry lodges, and established their first subscription libraries. Detailed tables display the names and dates of particular improvements in each town. The cultural transformation of Scotland that is the topic of chapter 6 is conveyed by means of a table with town-by-town information on the coming of libraries, reading rooms, assembly rooms, theaters, concert halls, and masonic lodges, as well as the founding of newspapers and periodicals, and a 45-page table appended to the entire book does the same thing for urban technology, describing how and when each of the thirty towns tackled such problems as street paving and construction, public lighting, water supply, and the building of new bridges and harbors. Whenever possible, visual images of the improvements under discussion are included, as well as plans and vistas that reveal multiple aspects of the towns in question. The illustrations, maps, and tables are closely keyed to the text, which uses examples drawn from the evidence to support its points. From all this, a picture emerges of Scottish urban improvement, moving slowly if at all until after the 1745 uprising, gaining momentum during the third quarter of the century, and accelerating at a rapid pace in the concluding three or four decades of the period under investigation.

Covering so much geographical and chronological ground has its costs. With the exception of a superb case study of the successes and failures associated with attempts to modernize Perth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (243–64), the book has difficulty depicting urban improvement as the result of human agency: it is much better at showing what happened in towns across the country than at explaining why or by whom. So much emphasis is put into excluding Edinburgh and Glasgow from the analysis that much is missed about their influences on, and connections with, the towns under study. For example, the importance of print is rightly emphasized but treated almost exclusively as a local phenomenon, without any consideration of the role that periodicals such as Edinburgh's Scots Magazine played on a national level, including provincial news and events. The growing complexity of Scotland's religious situation is discussed, but no attempt is made to connect it with the built environment by showing how the proliferation of houses of worship for various kinds of Presbyterian seceders, Episcopalians, and Roman Catholics was reflected in Scottish towns, and how regional differences (that is, between the heavily Episcopal northeast and the extensively evangelical southwest) came into play. Although the research foundation for this work is unusually well developed, statements occasionally appear with no empirical grounding whatsoever, such as this broad generalization: “Leading aristocrats were simply not much in Scotland after 1707”—supported only by a picture of the residence of the fourth earl of Kilmarnock, who was executed for treason in 1746 (373–74). The book's final chapter, on social and political order, is noticeably thinner than the others, with little visual evidence and inadequately investigated claims about the extent of urban stability.

As these shortcomings are largely the result of trying to do too much, they are more easily excused. What this book does well, it does brilliantly. For the first time, we glimpse the emergence of a structured, improving Scottish townscape beneath the level of the nation's leading urban centers, and we are able to detect general patterns, as well as local variations, across the urban spectrum. Like most truly pathbreaking works, this book will shape scholarship on its subject for many years to come.