Scotland the Brief

Part 2: Imperial Partner
11 Improvement

More Scots fought for George II at Culloden than fought for the Young Pretender. The country was already beginning to modernise and urbanise with record speed, and the rebellion was cited to intensify this change, by arguing that without it, disorder would reign. The result was dynamic but scarcely democratic, and carried in its wake a quite conscious propaganda manipulated by those who benefited by it.

The old system of communal farming by townships was suppressed in favour of muckle fermers (large tenants paying high rents for mixed farms) using systems of rotation, horse-ploughs, and 'steadings' (rows of simple cottages) to house their work-force, high-skilled though ill-paid. On this impacted the potato, widespread after 1780 and three times the nutritive value of wheat, and the Cheviot sheep, which could winter outdoors. The highlands and straths were cleared for the latter, often while the menfolk fought abroad. About a tenth of Scottish villages were totally rebuilt so that underemployed labourers could spin and weave or fish as well as work on the land. Such settlements were rapidly connected up with turnpike roads engineered by the 'great civilians': John Rennie, John Smeaton, Thomas Telford; canals were driven from Forth to Clyde and down the Great Glen, and horse-drawn railways linked mines and quarries with waterways.

A doctrine of education, social mobility and free markets, which would be codified in Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations (1776) was coupled with extensive social engineering, and the energies that might have confounded this were diverted to extending the Empire. The process would be recorded in the 1790s, parish by parish, in the Statistical Account of Scotland organised by the hyperactive Caithness landlord Sir John Sinclair, and the exercise was repeated in 1835-45: a thirty-odd volume documentation unique in Europe. On its basis the novelist John Galt wrote two theoretical histories in 1821-22, Annals of the Parish and The Provost which made the whole process seem inevitable. In the 1880s the industrial revolution and in the 1890s Professor W R Scotts phrase the Scottish Enlightenment were coined to describe this highly conscious episode of modernisation. At the time it was known as improvement, though some were more conscious of this than others. But it was notable that its opponents themselves seemed to accept that they were marginal forces: secessionists vainly trying to withstand the impersonal forces of progress. Probably no other country in Europe saw a middle class rise more rapidly through a system that turned all social relationships into forms of realisable capital, while creating a cultural superstructure that made this tolerable to those whose lives were changed and in most cases not improved by it. Scots endorsement of the Union certainly increased London's enthusiasm for union with Ireland, but after the bloodbath of 1798 (perhaps 30,000 died) this enforced absorption of a country different in religion and land relationships was troubled from the start.

The first motor of industrial change was the linen industry, traditionally the product of local flax-growers and handloom weavers. Innovations in bleaching from sour milk to sulphuric acid were brought in, and a market created in the slave-worked plantations of the West Indies and American colonies. By the end of the 18 th century slave-picked cotton was being spun on a far-larger scale in water-powered mills, some of them huge, and built in the Scots midlands, at Catrine, Deanston and New Lanark. Investment in these and the infrastructure that sustained them came from squeezing wages in favour of middle-class capital for investment in labour-saving equipment.

The most famous of Scots inventions was the steam engine, or rather James Watts perfecting of the crude and huge atmospheric mine-pump of Thomas Newcomen into an efficient supplier of rotary motion which could pump out mines, haul wagons and lifts full of coal, or power textile machinery. Watts patent dated from 1769, and his engines were built in Birmingham; hardly 20 were actually in use in Scotland by 1800.

But shortly afterwards steam engines were applied to water transport by William Symington, on his Charlotte Dundas tugboat on the Forth and Clyde Canal, and in 1811 Henry Bells passenger ship Comet took to the Clyde. Transport improvements helped open up the huge Monklands coal- and ironfield, east of Glasgow, in the 1820s, and were accelerated by it. 'Blackband' delivered a very high-grade iron for castings, just as the market boomed with the first high-performance locomotive-worked railways. Scotlands first, the Garnkirk and Glasgow, opened in 1831, only a year after George and Robert Stephensons Liverpool and Manchester. Within eighteen years trains ran by the east and west coast routes to London, and as far north as Aberdeen. Thomas Cook had started his famous cheap excursions, conveying the English in great numbers to the Highlands and Hebrides by train and steamer, and in 1851 lots of Scots of all social classes to the Crystal Palace in Londons Hyde Park. For the Scottish pioneer of industrial history, Samuel Smiles, the endless carriages of the specials crossing the Royal Border Bridge were the great endorsement of the Union.

This was the prelude to an astonishing half-century in which the Clyde basin literally became the workshop of the world: its greatest single concentration of locomotive- and ship-building and general engineering, whose triumphs ran from the Forth Bridge to Vienna s Prater Wheel and Cunards Aquitania and Queen Mary. These were essentially based on a fusion of scientific knowledge and engineering skills in the 1850s which revolutionised the steam engine. From low-pressure monster at sea it changed to high-pressure multi-cylinder power-pack, and brought the age of sail to an end by 1900; on rail massive multi-wheeled locomotives connected sea to sea. The 'Scotch Engineer' became a fixture of practically every port, erecting shop, and train depot from Canada to Japan.