Scottish Towns and Urban Society in the Enlightenment, c.1745-1820

This project will result in the development of new perspectives on a crucial phase in Scottish urbanization, namely, the second half of the eighteenth and opening decades of the nineteenth centuries. The main focus of investigation will be on the country's medium-sized and smaller towns, defined here as those with populations of between c.1,000 and 10,000. Recent influential accounts of urbanization in this period have tended to concentrate almost exclusively on the largest cities, especially Glasgow, and to be written in light of the knowledge of the onset of social crisis in Glasgow by the early 1830s. As a consequence, they present a narrative of urban change over which nineteenth-century realities and developments cast very long shadows. It was, however, in the smaller towns that the majority of the urban population lived in this period, and the failure to study them in depth has produced a distorted, or certainly very partial, portrayal of urbanization and urban society in the Georgian era. This project will use the notion of 'improvement' to explore the theme of change in the smaller towns. 'Improvement' was a term or process which comprehended both physical changes to the townscape - new types of public building, the creation of new streets and removal of obstructions from old ones, the introduction of lighting, paving and new water supplies, the re-location of markets - and transformation in patterns of leisure and cultural life, often summarised in terms of the pursuit of politeness. Exploiting hitherto underused and unused local and national archival sources, including an unusually, in a British context, rich collection of inventories of movable estates of urban dwellers drawn up at death, material dispersed in Court of Session and local burgh court cases, other official records (burgh council minutes, petitions, burgess admissions registers), gentry papers, maps and plans, and a burgeoning print culture (town directories, newspapers), and focusing on a sample of around thirty different towns throughout Scotland, selected to ensure as wide as possible a spread in terms of location and main characteristics, and on two fast growing urban regions / Angus and Perthshire in the east and Ayrshire in the west / included in order to explore the influence of evolving regional networks on patterns of development, the project will examine the nature and extent of the imprint which this agenda for change left on urban Scotland, and, equally importantly, the chronology of this transformation. By focusing on improvement, the project will also examine the extent of convergence in urban society in this period on a series of Anglo-British norms or models for change, for example, in terms of the appearances of buildings or the range and nature of associational and cultural life and facilities - charities, libraries, varied clubs, concerts, theatre, assemblies - while at the same time seeking to establish what, if anything, was distinctively Scottish about urban development in this period. It is, in short, designed to help place Scottish developments within a firmly British framework, and thus to broaden the understanding of British as well as Scottish patterns of urbanization in the later Georgian period. The time-span chosen reflects the distinctive chronology of Scottish urbanization in the eighteenth century, which began later and was more rapid than south of the border, but also a hypothesis that by 1820 Scottish urbanization was entering a new phase, which was in significant ways different from the period which will be under study here. The period chosen also coincides neatly with the flowering of the Scottish Enlightenment, which, in turn, created a climate of opinion which helped to shape the nature of 'improvement' in a range of spheres, not just urban life, as a concept, a process (or series of processes), and as thepre-eminent national goal.