Abstract
ABSTRACTScots songs were important to the development of the Scottish Enlightenment concept of “improvement”—defined by Adam Smith as a progression of human societies through four stages: “first, the Age of Hunters; secondly, the Age of Shepherds; thirdly, the Age of Agriculture; and fourthly, the Age of Commerce.” During the Scottish Enlightenment, improvement was constituted partly through an emergent network of eighteenth-century Scottish song culture consisting of circulations and settings of songs for Allan Ramsay’s The Gentle Shepherd by Francesco Barsanti, Joseph Haydn, and others, often accompanied by paratextual essays and visual imagery, and through an appeal to localized discourses of Scottish pastoral.
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