Landowners and Urban Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Abstract

This paper challenges the idea that eighteenth-century Scotland was simply, as T. C. Smout once described it, ‘a landowners' world’. It does so by examining the relationships between landowners and a sample of medium-sized and smaller burghs. To some extent, the case made here – that historians have by and large not properly appreciated the degree of independence and influence of the burghs – is suggestive. Partly, it derives from a particular view of the nature of ‘urban community’ and civic identity in this period. However, the bulk of the case rests on the close analysis of a series of issues which tended to bring towns and landowners into conflict and draws heavily on one particular case study – Kirkcudbright in the later Georgian period. Very modest in size, and with a single local dominant landowner – the earls of Selkirk – whose properties surrounded the burgh, Kirkcudbright provides a lens through which to view a relationship between town and landowner which was far from one-sided. As the case of Kirkcudbright illustrates very clearly, even where a landowner exercised significant and close influence, burgh elites took very seriously the task of stewardship of burgh interests and privileges, and they did so, so far as we can tell, with considerable support from the urban population.