This impressive collection of essays is based on a two-year seminar series of the Research centre in Scottish History at the University of Strathclyde. New and original research, as well as historiographical overviews and commentaries, illuminate the study of this formative century in the creation of modern Scotland. Contributors are leading figures in their fields, and the Scottish experience is examined within an international dimension. Topics include Scottish modernisation before the Industrial Revolution, the Union of 1707, Scotland and British expansion, Scottish Jacobitism, the Catholic underground, Scottish national identity, the Scottish Enlightenment, urbanisation, demographic change, Scottish Gaeldom, Highland estate management and tenant emigration, and Scottish radicalism.Contributors: Thomas M. Devine, John R. Young, Michael Fry, Allan I. Macinnes, James F. McMillan, Alexander Murdoch, Richard J. Finlay, Jane Rendall, Bernard Aspinwall, Ian D. Whyte, Robert E. Tyson, T. C. Smout, Andrew Mackillop, Christopher A. Whatley, Elaine W. McFarland.

Sir Tom Devine is the Sir William Fraser Professor Emeritus of Scottish History and Palaeography at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author or editor of more that forty books on Scottish historical studies and related fields. The only historian to be knighted by HM The Queen 'for services to the study of Scottish history', he has been described by The Times newspaper as 'as close to a national bard as the nation has'.