subscribe or login to access all content.
This book investigates the environmental roots of the Scottish Enlightenment. What was the place of the natural world in Adam Smith's famous defense of free trade? The author recovers the forgotten networks of improvers and natural historians that sought to transform the soil, plants, and climate of Scotland in the eighteenth century. The Highlands offered a vast outdoor laboratory for rival liberal and conservative views of nature and society. But when the improvement schemes foundered toward the end of the century, northern Scotland instead became a crucible for anxieties about overpopulatio ... More
Keywords: Scottish Enlightenment, free trade, Adam Smith, natural historians, Highlands, nature, overpopulation, resource exhaustion, economic growth, environmentalism
Print publication date: 2013 | Print ISBN-13: 9780300162547 |
Published to Yale Scholarship Online: October 2013 | DOI:10.12987/yale/9780300162547.001.0001 |
subscribe or login to access all content.