This is a study of Scottish society from the defeat of the last Jacobite rebellion at Culloden in 1746 to the passing into law of the Scottish Reform Bill in July 1832. It is a period when the Scottish Enlightenment reached and perhaps passed its peak, but if the earlier decades saw the rise of some of the most influential thinkers of the contemporary world, the latter part of the period saw a flourishing of imaginative literature. Economically, the period saw quite unprecedented change in the Lowlands, in the HIghlands, too, though there the transformation demanded by the more advanced areas of the British Isles proved incompatible with an ancient culture and way of life.
Bruce Lenman's account catches the hey-day of the Ancien Regimein Scotland, but an Ancien Regime that after Culloden was totally committed to integrating into Great Britain. The people who mattered were the North Britons, and the creative minds of the period had to find a place within the chains of patronage and dependency that held North British society together.