University of Cambridge
An Economic Geography of the Industrial Revolution in Scotland, c.1760–1840
Abstract
dc:description.abstractScotland is almost entirely absent from the British Industrial Revolution literature, despite being one of the world’s first industrialising economies. This absence has been partially attributed to a paucity of statistical and systematic studies of the kind that has transformed our understanding of English industrialisation. With a view to fill this gap in the literature, this thesis presents an economic geography of the Industrial Revolution in Scotland based on the *Old* and *New Statistical Accounts of Scotland* (1791–99 and 1834–42), collections of essay‐style answers by parish clergy to a 170‐question survey that include observations on the state of parishes’ agriculture and industry, demographics, ecclesiastical matters and more. I used it to create a dataset describing parishes’ agriculture and industry using 61 ordinal, categorical variables. Because the data is unsuited to standard multivariate statistics, I introduce a novel approach based on geometric data analysis to produce a structured, systematic descriptive and visual analysis, in contrast to the explanatory statistical approaches more common in economic history. The statistical analysis also acts as a framework for collating and synthesising extensive qualitative source material and the large, relatively inconclusive and disparate secondary literature on Scotland’s industrialisation. The Industrial Revolution in Scotland is found to have differed substantially in several important regards to common depictions of the British Industrial Revolution. Scotland relatively low wages, a lack of skilled labour, distinct cultural and institutional developments, and its demographic transition was initiated by an unexplained decline in mortality, and not a rise in fertility as in England. Based on the latter I argue population growth is an under‐explored factor and potential explanation for the Industrial Revolution. The character of the Industrial Revolution differed substantially depending on location, leading to the emergence of economic regions with spatial divisions of labour and inequalities. National aggregate approaches fail to account for these differences and omit fundamental aspects of it, and when doing so the Industrial Revolution in Scotland appears as dramatic and ‘revolutionary’, significantly different to the now orthodox depiction of a slow, ‘evolutionary’ transformation of the British economy.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2022
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Lunde, Tobias
- Advisors dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Warde, Paul
- Shaw-Taylor, Leigh
Subjects
dc:subject × 5Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.99086
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/352936