This book is the first monograph to analyse the workings of Scotland’s legal profession in its early modern European context. It is a comprehensive survey of lawyers working in the local and central courts; investigating how they interacted with their clients and with each other, the legal principles governing ethical practice, and how they fulfilled a social role through providing free services to the poor and also services to town councils and other corporations. Based heavily on a wide range of archival sources, and reflecting the contemporary importance of local societies of lawyers, John Finlay offers a groundbreaking yet accessible study of the eighteenth-century legal profession which adds a new dimension to our knowledge of Enlightenment Scotland.

Cultural Histories of Law, Media and Emotion: Public Justice explores how the legal history of long-eighteenth-century Britain has been transformed by the cultural turn, and especially the associated history of emotion. Seeking to reflect on the state of the field, 13 essays by leading and emerging scholars bring cutting-edge research to bear on the intersections between law, print culture and emotion in Britain across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Divided into three sections, this collection explores the ‘public’ as a site of legal sensibility; it demonstrates how the rhetoric of emotion constructed the law in legal practice and in society and culture; and it highlights how approaches from cultural and emotions history have recentred the individual, the biography and the group to explain long-running legal-historical problems. Across this volume, authors evidence how engagements between cultural and legal history have revitalised our understanding of law’s role in eighteenth-century culture and society, not least deepening our understanding of justice as produced with and through the public. This volume is the ideal resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in the history of emotions as well as the legal history of Britain from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth century.

This book, first published in 1988, is a study of the development of accounting in eighteenth century Scotland. The investigation is organised around a survey of early Scottish accounting texts, an analysis of their exposition of the Italian method of book-keeping and their treatment of certain selected topics. The aim is to evaluate the contribution that these Scottish accountants made to the development of a profession.

This is the second of two collections of correspondence written by early modern English women philosophers. In this volume, Jacqueline Broad presents letters from three influential thinkers of the eighteenth century: Mary Astell, Elizabeth Thomas, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn. Broad provides introductory essays for each figure and explanatory annotations to clarify unfamiliar language, content, and historical context for the modern reader. Her selections make available many letters that have never been published before or that live scattered in various archives, obscure manuscripts, and rare books. The discussions range in subject from moral theology and ethics to epistemology and metaphysics; they involve some well-known thinkers of the period, such as John Norris, George Hickes, Mary Chudleigh, John Locke, and Edmund Law. By centering epistolary correspondence, Broad's anthology works to reframe early modern philosophy, the foundation for so much of twentieth-century philosophy, as consisting of collaborative debates that women actively participated in and shaped. Together with its companion volume, Women Philosophers of Eighteenth-Century England: Selected Correspondence is an invaluable primary resource for students, scholars, and those undertaking further research in the history of women's contributions to the formation and development of early modern thought.

Drawing on Court of Session records uncovered by John Finlay, this study investigates the important role of College members in the cultural and economic flowering of Scotland, and argues that a single Law institution had a marked influence on the Scottish

This book reassesses the actual effects of the Bubble Act, still popularly associated with the bursting of the South Sea Bubble. The book builds on the foundational work of Ron Harris to discuss the act’s effect on corporate governance, literary culture, colonial law, and the Industrial Revolution. The Bubble Act was deemed an empty letter within England itself as it was rarely used in legal proceedings. Several chapters consider whether this was the case outside England, from Scotland to the Americas, India, and Africa. Others assess the impact of the act, both on literary culture and in the history of economic thought. The act has been conceptualized as a brake on economic development or of little consequence. This edited collection offers a timely reassessment of the Bubble Act and its legacy.

This collection brings together a selection of the most cited articles published by Professor John W. Cairns. Essays range from Scots Law from 16th and 17th century Scotland, through to the 18th century influence of Dutch Humanism into the 19th century, a

The essays presented in The Ian Willock Collection on Law and Justice in the Twenty-First Century by those who knew Ian Willock, as well as those who have been inspired by his concerns, represent the wide compass of Ian’s interests. These range from a concern with the development of legal regulation to the relationship between social change and the justice system, as well as his particular interest in the accessibility of the justice system. This tribute provides a microcosm of the changes and shifts which occurred in legal education and the legal profession in the years between 1964 and the current century. The profound impact of Ian Willock’s life work is evident through the wide-ranging essays in this collection.

A critique of attempts by conservative eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors to appropriate the rhetoric of victimhood and appeals to "rights" to safeguard the status of the powerful. As revolution and popular unrest roiled the final decades of the eighteenth century, authors, activists, and philosophers across the British Empire hailed the rise of the liberal subject, valorizing the humanity of the marginalized and the rights of members of groups long considered inferior or subhuman. Yet at the same time, a group of conservative authors mounted a reactionary attempt to cultivate sympathy for the privileged. In Defending Privilege, Nicole Mansfield Wright examines works by Tobias Smollett, Charlotte Smith, Walter Scott, and others to show how conservatives used the rhetoric of victimhood in attempts to convince ordinary readers to regard a privileged person's loss of legal agency as a catastrophe greater than the calamities and legally sanctioned exclusion suffered by the poor and the enslaved. In promoting their agenda, these authors resuscitated literary modes regarded at the time as derivative or passé—including romance, the gothic, and epistolarity—or invented subgenres that are neglected today due to widespread revilement of their politics (the proslavery novel). Although these authors are not typically considered alongside one another in scholarship, they are united by their firsthand experience of legal conflict: each felt that their privilege was degraded through lengthy disputes. In examining the work of these eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century authors, Wright traces a broader reactionary framework in the Anglophone literary legacy. Each novel seeks to reshape and manipulate public perceptions of who merits legal agency: the right to initiate a lawsuit, serve as a witness, seek counsel from a lawyer, and take other legal actions. As a result, Defending Privilege offers a counterhistory to scholarship on the novel's capacity to motivate the promulgation of human rights and champion social ascendance through the upwardly mobile realist character.

Making the Union Work: Scotland, 1651–1763, explores and analyses existing narratives of Jacobitism and Unionism in late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century Scotland. Using in-depth archival research, the book questions the extent to which the currency of kinship patronage politics persisted in Scotland as the competing ideologies of Scottish Jacobitism and British Whiggism grew. It discusses the connection between the manifest corruption of patronage politics and the efflorescence of the Scottish Enlightenment. It also examines the stance taken by David Hume and Adam Smith in defining themselves as philosophers first, Whigs second, but Scots above all else, and analyses whether they achieved international success because of or despite the parliamentary union with England in 1707. Organised chronologically and concluding with an assessment of the newly formed United Kingdom in the decades following the 1707 union, Making the Union Work: Scotland, 1651–1763 will be of great interest to researchers and academics of early modern Scotland.