7 - General review

Summary

The period 1821-1914 witnesses the rise of the regional city to the point where it plays a dominant role in the economic and cultural life of the country. Eighteenth-century growth had been accompanied by the multiplication of local marketing centres, but these places were seen as accessories to rural-based ‘improvement’. The expectation that they could attract manufacturing reflected the improvement ethos, encouraged it would seem by landowners seeking to capitalise on their assets, and also by the desire to maintain continuity in local communities: there was some popular misgiving over urban life in large towns, arising perhaps from perceived ‘culture shock’ in transferring from a rural to an urban environment. The situation was now drastically modified by the continuing revolution in technology. The use of coal-fired boilers to produce steam introduced a new scale of industrial production that required greater discrimination over location (particularly in relation to labour supply and coal distribution costs) and placed manufacturing both financially and managerially beyond the capacities of lairds brought up on the ‘general practitioner’ ethos of eighteenth-century estate management. And as steam was also raised in locomotive boilers the constraints of inaccessibility that had defied the canal builders and turnpike road administrators were eventually eliminated. Scotland became a functionally unified country focussing on a group of great cities. Changes in settlement patterns can now be more readily illustrated thanks to the accumulation of census data. It may be helpful to introduce maps of population distribution in Scotland (Figure 7.1) and, in more detail, the Central Belt (Figure 7.2) at this stage.