The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, II: Enlightenment and Expansion, 1707-1800. Ed. by STEPHEN W. BROWN and WARREN MCDOUGALL

Abstract

The multipart archipelagic histories of the book that are now advancing steadily towards completion, for the Irish book, for the book in Scotland, and for the book in Britain, accompanied by the Welsh volume A Nation and its Books (1998), have both gained and lost by a certain independence of vision, compilation, and publication. It was never going to be possible to encompass the whole within Britain, quite apart from the political realities of different periods, and for this reason this was designed so as to be allusive where necessary, offering a kind of balance but eventually relying on the more regionally focused series. This was a point made explicitly in some of the Britain volumes. In Volume v (1695–1830), the equivalent for Scotland Volume ii, the editors made space for fifteen or so pages on the Scottish trade, by Iain Bevan and Warren McDougall — the latter one of the editors of the volume under review — and ‘Scotland’ takes up well over a column in the index. But this was necessarily brief, in earnest of what was to come. Now the Scottish Enlightenment, the years leading up to it, and the years that followed, have at last received proper treatment. It has been worth the wait.