18th Century
Scotland was a poor rural, agricultural society with a population of 1.3 million in 1755. Its transformation into a rich leader of modern industry came suddenly and unexpectedly in the next 150 years, following its union with England in 1707 and its integration with the advanced English and imperial economies. The transformation was led by two cities that grew rapidly after 1770. Glasgow, on the river Clyde, was the base for the tobacco and sugar trade with an emerging textile industry. Edinburgh was the administrative and intellectual centre where the Scottish Enlightenment was chiefly based.
Read more about this topic: Scottish History
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“Who is so deaf or so blind as he
That wilfully will neither hear nor see?”
—16th century English proverb, collected in J. Heywood, Dialogue of Proverbs (1546)