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By Root 720 0

not cease overnight. Even Defoe, whose role as an English agent was to sell Union to the Scots, had found relations difficult. ‘Never two nations that had so much affinity in circumstances, have had such inveteracy and aversion to one another in their blood,’ he wrote disconsolately. By the 1750s, as trade improved and the benefits of Union began to be felt, the city emerged from its self-absorption. Gradually, it began to look to England and London as its example; there was much talk of Britishness and the first furtive attempts at English speech, English habits and English thinking. Soirees (pronounced ‘sorries’ in Edinburgh and ‘swurries’ in Glasgow) were held more frequently, tea was drunk and Scots began, as the philosopher David Hume put it, to be considered, ‘a very corrupt dialect’. Fifty years later, Lord Cockburn (rivalled only by Sir Walter Scott for his domination of the Edinburgh scene) wrote gloomily that ‘When I was a boy, no Englishman could have addressed the Edinburgh populace without making them stare, and probably laugh. We looked at an English boy at the High School as a ludicrous and incomprehensible monster. Now these monsters are so common that they are no monsters at all.’

The Scottish Enlightenment emerged slowly from this half-derelict background. The great upswell of enterprise and industrialisation produced an extraordinary group of men who came from lowly backgrounds to fill the sudden need for innovation. In the century after Union, Scotland produced an exceptional group of artists, philosophers and scientists, including Burns, Smollett, Adam Smith, Alan Ramsay, Robert, William and John Adam, Walter Scott, James Hogg, Henry Raeburn, James Watt, Thomas Telford and David Hume. The men who guided the Enlightenment were united by a growing belief in the force of reason. Man, they argued, was no longer at the will of his environment; he could explain it, control it and shape it where necessary. Life in all its aspects could be improved upon; there was to be no such thing as an old truth. Faith could be questioned, landscape could be shaped, economies could be transformed. In particular, they came to regard the ??dy of mankind and the improvement of human nature itself as an essential part of enlightened life. They put aside the ??oning faiths of the pre-Union years and replaced them with a new philosophy, brisk and scientific. Scotland was no longer forcibly strapped to her past; it was possible to improve on history.

The intellectual adventurousness of the age was matched by a rush of enterprise. Agriculture and business flourished, new industries boomed and old practices vanished. The expansive mood was a blessing for entrepreneurs. Many of the richer merchants took to the ultra-fashionable new hobby of agricultural improvement, turning their acreages into models of economic discipline and landscaped tameness. Some went north to enlighten the misguided Highlanders. They planted trees, started enterprises and encouraged the use of new machinery. Alongside the new flocks of scientists and social engineers, the inventors throve. Engineering, previously considered a profession for tradesmen and foreigners, began to develop a status and confidence of its own. Some of the mill-wrights, masons and clerks who moved into the profession were shrewd enough to see the urgent need for new design, and rose to meet the challenge. Down in England, Smeaton was building lighthouses, Arkwright was showing off the benefits of water frames and Trevithick was designing prototype locomotives. In Glasgow, James Watt moved on from making musical instruments to experimenting with steam engines. In the north, Thomas Telford had begun threading roads around the coasts, while John Rennie was building bridges. By the mid-nineteenth century, Prince Albert was heard to note approvingly that ‘If we want any work done of an unusual character, and send for an architect, he hesitates, debates, trifles: we send for an engineer, and he does it.’ The heroes of post-Enlightenment Britain also encouraged the view that hard work, imagination