This volume takes up a wide range of agricultural topics and themes, running from the early sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. The contributors also range widely, from graduate students to retirees and Emeriti, including the Scottish Historiographer Royal. Without exception, the contributors agree with earlier scholarship that the emergence of capitalist agriculture and agrarian modernity occurred in the later eighteenth century, primarily after 1760. The earlier period (c.1550–1750)—the concern of nearly all the essays in the volume—offers nothing so decisively clear. The editors note that the volume steers a “middle course” between revolution and evolution (11). What results is a scattering of inquiries, often enough ending with a plaintive call for further research, rather than a coherent or holistic vision of pre-modern or proto-modern Scottish agriculture.
Julian Goodare leads off with a discussion of early modern Scottish attitudes toward agriculture and images of it. He identifies five different “discourses of agriculture”: the moralizing discourse (that denounced sinful agricultural communities); the metaphorical discourse (adopting agricultural imagery in creative writing); the mystical discourse (inviting an emotional response to the environment); the humorous discourse (that largely mocked peasants); and an economic discourse (that considered production, distribution, and consumption, at moments in ways that might anticipate the later improvers). Goodare also notes three additional discourses—a legal discourse, a humanitarian discourse, and an ecological discourse—that he declines to analyze. For each of the five discourses, Goodare cites an extraordinary range of literary sources, going on to supply even a contemporary illustration. Yet an overall theme or argument often fails to emerge. He notes that, in 1633, the travel writer William Lithgow urged long leases so that tenant farmers might feel encouraged to improve and develop their properties (43). Inexplicably, Goodare does not note that reform of this sort had featured in Scottish writing for well over a century, including the work of such prominent figures as the late medieval scholastic John Mair (1518) and the Protestant reformer James Henrisoun (1547–48). In the end, Goodare suggests that the moralizing discourse produced far fewer denunciations of rapacious landlords after the 1596 reaction and that fear of the lower orders seems to have generally limited this kind of commentary. It is surprising that Goodare neglects to mention the minister Robert Bruce, who vigorously denounced landlord greed, and whose apparent program of reform only became partially deflected with the 1590–91 witchcraft panic.
Kevin Hall discusses the famine of 1622–23, which, he argues, proved more severe, if much briefer, than the prolonged famine of the 1690s. The earlier catastrophe was made worse by the preceding government decision to export grain; good harvests and a shortage of specie had led to the new policy. Hall describes horrific scenes of death in the streets and of desperate migrations. Working from a wide range of (the limited available) sources, Hall concludes that perhaps upwards of 64,000 died of starvation and famine-related disease.
Alan R. MacDonald finds anticipation of Enlightenment era improvement in the management of Walter Dundas's Linlithgow estates at the outset of the seventeenth century. Systematic record-keeping, waged labor, crop development, and a focus on productivity rather than military capability, shaped Dundas’ increasingly quantified world. Norah Carlin finds something broadly similar earlier still in the Midlothian estates of James Forrester II. She concludes with earlier commentators that landed class success was achieved on the backs of their tenants.
John G. Harrison examines Stirlingshire area farming between 1560 and 1750. He agrees with the others that his terminal date marks the beginning of substantial change; yet significant developments had emerged at various points that encouraged systemic agricultural change, not least by ensuring that the idea of improvement itself “was in the air” (182). T.C. Smout considers the apparently uniquely Scottish practice of “fiars prices.” Dating from at least the early sixteenth century, “fiars prices” were calculated annually and meant the market price of basic commodities for the coming year. Determined normally at the Sheriff's Court, the “fiars” facilitated exchange when obligations were so often in kind rather than money. The practice eased Scotland's transition into a fully monetized world, and met with Adam Smith's approval.
Gains Murdoch takes up the connection between agriculture and banking between 1695 (the founding of the Bank of Scotland) and the much-noted takeoff date in the later eighteenth century. The Bank of Scotland and its later rival, the Royal Bank of Scotland (1727), were both more oriented to agriculture than was the contemporaneous Bank of England. Both show signs of a Scottish agrarian patriotism. Yet class attitudes disadvantaged the banks and related societies: only late on were loans (and memberships) granted to tenant farmers, where much of the innovation was actually taking place.
Unlike the earlier essays, Philipp Robinson Rössner undertakes a broad vista, examining Scotland in “the mercantilist age,” 1600–1800. Opening with a comment about Scotland from the early twentieth-century German sociologist Werner Sombart, Rössner reflects on the Scottish role in the “great divergence,” whereby Western Europe modernized in ways unparalleled elsewhere on the globe. He is concerned (and indignant) that Scotland's economic development becomes subsumed within “the usual imperial and Anglocentric epistemic perspective” (236). Rössner finds in Scotland a distinctly forward-facing, future-oriented mode of thought that appeared strikingly in the 1690s and that both underwrote and survived the Darien disaster. Yet the beginnings reached back still further to the mid-century revolution, becoming a part of the continental mercantilist/cameralist discourses from the 1660s and especially the 1670s. Although he applauds Gordon Marshall's work on presbyteries and profits, and although Max Weber looms briefly, Rössner declines to consider the theological bases underwriting Scotland's forward-looking development. R.A. Houston concludes the collection with a brief historiographical overview.
The essays in this collection offer data-rich insight to the complexities of early modern Scottish agriculture. A framework for perceiving that world, unfortunately, does not emerge.
