Engineering 'Modern' Scotland: The Stevenson Maps and Plans and Scotland's Built Infrastructure, c. 1800-1900

The major question I intend to address will be how 'modern' Scotland was constructed, both physically and ideologically. What power relations and ideological conventions enabled certain visions of Scotland to take physical form but consigned others to the purely theoretical? What role did the engineer or engineering company take in shaping how space and infrastructure was understood? Did this differ over time, between individual engineers or across geographical locations? Did economic factors alone shape building projects or did other ideals, priorities and preferences play a part in eventual decisions about Scotland's built environment? Did different types of project require different assumptions and principles to be invoked in their justification? Were different visions of Scotland expressed in different plans, or was there a coherent, shared vision between all involved in the creation of the Scottish built environment?
This project will also pay close attention to geographical and temporal specificity, in particular considering whether engineers applied different constructs to certain places and, if so, what this indicates about questions of national identity and the coherency of the concept of a Scottish nation in this era.
The National Library of Scotland holds an archive of over 3,000 maps and plans from the Stevenson Engineering Company, in addition to an extensive archive of written material. Relatively little work has been done on this collection, in particular very little research has used the collection cohesively, combining written and visual sources. During my project, I aim to carefully examine these documents, utilising a combination of visual and textual sources produced for different audiences to develop a detailed and nuanced understanding of the vision of Scotland proposed and disseminated by the company.
The Stevenson Engineering Company was involved in the design, construction and maintenance of a variety of infrastructure projects across Scotland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a significant contributor to the changing landscape of the nation, a detailed investigation into the papers of this company should provide interesting insight into how modern Scotland was conceptualised and what powers, ideologies and groups were the most able to shape the landscape in both physical and imaginative terms.
I will supplement the Stevenson Engineering Company documents by considering other maps, charts, plans and written documents to compare the vision generated by the Stevenson Engineering Company with the representations of the same space created by different groups for different purposes. I hope that this will enable me to place the Stevenson Engineering Company within the wider context of nineteenth century ideas about infrastructure, space and landscape and to address questions of power and agency with regards to physical space.
By using this study of a single company to address wider questions about the assumptions, ideologies and powers involved in shaping Scotland's landscape, this project will provide significant insight into the forces that shaped a vision of modern Scotland in the nineteenth century. It will contribute to debates surrounding the nature of modernity and the ways in which people adopted or resisted ideas of rationalism, order, science and technology. Furthermore, because of the important role played by the national landscape in the formation of a national identity, I hope that knowing how ideas about the national landscape were formulated, modulated and imposed on physical space will provide significant insight into questions about Scottish national identity. This research will therefore extend knowledge and understanding into key questions of identity, the nation, the role of science and technology and the concept of modernity in the nineteenth century.