For the Betterment of Mankind: Scotland, the Enlightenment and the Agricultural Revolution

REFERENCES

• This title adopts a catchphrase of the mid-eighteenth century, typical of contemporary rhetoric, and dialogue, and of the new ‘science of man’, representing both the intellectual and pragmatic thrust of the agricultural revolution as a by-product of the Scottish Enlightenment. The paper was presented at the Annual Conference of the Society for Folklife Studies held in Clydesdale to mark the recent opening of the Museum of Scottish Country Life at Wester Kittochside on 2 July 2001.
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• William Smellie, Literary and Characteristic Lives of Gregory, Kames, Hume and Smith (Edinburgh, 1800), pp. 161–62.
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• An introduction to the period, its intellectual manifestations and a range of critical scholarship can be found in David Daiches (ed. with others), A Hotbed of Genius. The Scottish Enlightenment 1730–1790 (Edinburgh University Press, 1986); this was the title and subject of an exhibition held in the National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh, 8 July–20 September 1986.
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• The key measures of this legislation have been summarised in R. H. Campbell and J. B. A. Dow, Source Book of Scottish Economic and Social History (Oxford, 1968), pp. 9–15; they can be read at source in the Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, viii, 488; ix, 421; ix, 462.
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• Ruth Richens, ‘Changes in the Physical and Social Landscapes of Three Lanarkshire Farms during the Eighteenth-Century Agricultural Reorganisation’, in Review of Scottish Culture, 9 (1995–96), 98–112 (see especially pp. 99–100).
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• Alexander Fenton, Scottish Country Life (Edinburgh, 1976), pp. 18–23; Hugh Cheape, ‘150 Years On — The Work of James Smith of Deanston’, in Country Life News [Edinburgh: National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland] 11 (1982), 4–11.
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• See, for example, Henry Hamilton (ed.), Selections from the Monymusk Papers (1713–1755) (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1945); J. A. S. Watson and G. D. Amery, ‘Early Scottish Agricultural Writers (1697–1790)’, in Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland (THASS), 5th series, 43 (1931), 60–85; J. A. Symon, Scottish Farming Past and Present (Edinburgh, 1959), Appendix I, ‘Chronological list of books relating to Scottish agriculture published down to 1850’, pp. 440–52.
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• James Gray Kyd, Scottish Population Statistics (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1975), pp. xviii–xix.
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• ‘Kailyard’ summed up the sentimentalised view of the recent past, that is, the rural Scotland of the nineteenth century before industrialisation, and the coming of the railways. This scenario was recreated by a small number of very successful novelists such as J. M. Barrie, Ian Maclaren and S. R. Crockett; see George Blake, Barrie and the Kailyard School (London, 1951) and Ian Campbell, Kailyard. A New Assessment (Edinburgh, 1981).
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• Henry W. Meikle, Some Aspects of Later Seventeenth-Century Scotland (Glasgow, 1947); Gordon Donaldson, ‘Stair’s Scotland: the Intellectual Inheritance’, in The Juridical Review, 26 (1981), 128–45; Alexander Broadie, The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990).
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• The Works of Robert Fergusson (London, 1807), pp. 232–33.
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• Nicholas T. Phillipson and Rosalind Mitchison (eds), Scotland in the Age of Improvement (Edinburgh University Press, 1970); see also Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford University Press, 1954).
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• John Strang, Glasgow and its Clubs, 3rd edn (Glasgow 1864); Jennifer J. Carter and Joan H. Pittock (eds), Aberdeen and the Enlightenment (Aberdeen University Press, 1987).
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• John Hill Burton (ed.), The Autobiography of Dr Alexander Carlyle oflnveresk, 1722—1805 (Edinburgh, 1910), p. 312.
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• Robert Maxwell (ed.), The Select Transactions of the Honourable the Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1743), pp. ix–x, xviii–xxiii; Scots Magazine, xiii (1750), 31–32.
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• Burton, p. 311; Scots Magazine, xvii (1755), 126.
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• Burton, pp. 439–40, 442.
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• Alexander Allardyce (ed.), Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century from the MSS of John Ramsay Esq. of Ochtertyre (Edinburgh, 1888), 2 vols, passim; William Creech, ‘Letters Addressed to Sir John Sinclair Respecting the Mode of Living, Arts, Commerce, Literature and Manners of Edinburgh’, in The Statistical Account of Scotland, vi (1793), 587–88.
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• Allardyce, p. 24.
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• Mossner, p. 370.
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• Encyclopaedia Britannica, 111 (Edinburgh, 1771), 295.
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• Scots Magazine, xvii (1755), 126.
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• Scots Magazine, xvii (1755), 127.
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• Scots Magazine, xxi (1759), 288–90.
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• Scots Magazine, xxvi (1764), 229–30.
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• Watson and Amery, pp. 71–73, 76–78.
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• The County Agricultural Reports are listed in J. A. Symon, Scottish Farming Past and Present, Appendix I.
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• A Small Society of Farmers in Buchan’, in David Souter, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Banff (Edinburgh, 1812), Appendix VI; R. C. Boud, ‘Scottish Agricultural Improvement Societies, 1723–1835’, in Review of Scottish Culture, 1 (1984), 70–90.
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• James Fergusson (ed.), Letters of George Dempster to Sir Adam Fergusson, 1756–1813 (London, 1934), pp. xviii–xxi.
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• National Library of Scotland MS 1929; see also Charles Rodgers, ‘Jottings from the Records of a Farming Society in the County of Forfar, 1803–1814’, in Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 16 (1881–82), 231–35.
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• ‘Report on Distress and Famine in Scotland in the Year 1782, in Consequence of the late Harvest and Loss of the Potato Crop, 28 May 1783’, in Parliamentary Papers, xxxvii, 281 (printed May 1846).
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• Highland Society Sederunt Book, 1, 1–2 (by courtesy of the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland, Ingliston House, Midlothian); see also A. Ramsay, A History of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1879), passim.
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• Prize Essays and Transactions of the Highland Society of Scotland, 1 (1799), i.
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• Robert Chambers, Traditions of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1868), p. 162.
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• Highland Society Sederunt Book, 1, 38, 40, 52–53, 70, 134; Prize Essays and Transactions of the Highland Society of Scotland, 1 (1799), xxxvi–xxxvii; Scots Magazine, lxviii (1806), 659–62.
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• R. C. Boud, p. 73.
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• George Robertson, Rural Recollections, or the Progress of Improvement in Agriculture and Rural Affairs (Irvine, 1829).
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