8. Culture and Society in the 18th Century Province: The Case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment

2019 ◽  
pp. 407-448 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment

THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ACCOUNTING

1988 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Mepham
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment

This article outlines the lives and background of the main writers who were active in the 18th century period of ‘Scottish Ascendancy’ in accounting texts. The impressive publications produced by this group are detailed and the question of why this phenomenon should have occurred in Scotland is considered. It is suggested that the Scottish Ascendancy in accounting texts can be considered as part of the achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment and as complementary to the more renowned works in economics, law and philosophy, which are generally recognized as an important component of that movement.

Morality and Feeling in the Scottish Enlightenment

Philosophy ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Graham
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Sense ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment

This paper argues that a recurrent mistake is made about Scottish moral philosophy in the 18th century with respect to its account of the relation between morality and feeling. This mistake arises because Hume is taken to be the main, as opposed to the best known, exponent of a version of moral sense theory. In fact, far from occupying common ground, the other main philosophers of the period—Hutcheson, Reid, Beattie—understood themselves to be engaged in refuting Hume. Despite striking surface similarities, closer examination reveals a deep difference between Hume's and Reid's conception of ‘the science mind’ which marked the philosophy of the period. Properly understood, this difference shows that mainstream Scottish moral philosophy, far from subscribing to Hume's dictum about morality being ‘more properly felt than judged of’, held that morality is ‘more properly judged than felt of’.

scholarly journals Maternal Death: Scotland’s Enlightenment

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-76
Author(s):  
Rosemary Mander ◽  
Valerie Fleming ◽  
Rosalind K. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Maternal Mortality ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Maternal Death ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Puerperal Fever ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Breaking Work ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

The historical literature on maternal death gives little attention to the problem in Scotland. Data in a popular, yet serious, national publication for 1739–1772 suggest that there was some public interest in the problem of maternal mortality. This interest may have been associated with the democratization of many forms of knowledge, central to the Scottish Enlightenment. The publication of these data is linked to the little-known, but ground-breaking, work of Alexander Gordon on puerperal fever in Aberdeen, which long predated the study by Ignaz Semmelweis. This 18th-century publication is compared with the popular media of the 21st century.

Towards a Genealogy of Sentimentalism in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Burnetts
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Sentimental Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
Literary Cultures ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Chapter One charts a genealogy of the sentimental mode, from the sentimental literary cultures of 18th century Europe through to the widespread success of popular melodrama in Europe and America. It draws connections between the sentimental novel, ‘Moral Sense’ philosophy of the 18th century ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, and 19th century melodrama, as discourses and traditions each bound up with questions relating to affect, the subject and society. While textual analysis of specific texts seeks to draw out the continuities and problematics of sentimentalism as a literary and theatrical genre, a focus remains on establishing the critical contours of the term’s cultural history. The section’s particular aim is to trace the term’s fall from grace while nevertheless establishing its full theoretical significance to film theory. It will also review influential literary scholarship on the cultural gendering of sentimentalism of the period, whether discerned in the ideological consolidation of bourgeois society, the continuance of sentimental narrative in theatrical melodrama and the novel (Stowe, Dickens) or in the various periodicals, guidebooks and assorted paraphernalia that make up a feminizing culture for theorists like Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins and Lauren Berlant.

scholarly journals Rethinking savagery: Slavery experiences and the role of emotions in Oldendorp’s mission ethnography

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 28-42
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Van Gent
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
West Indies ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
The People ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Love ◽  
Danish West Indies ◽  
Colonial Contact

By the late 18th century, the Moravian mission project had grown into a global enterprise. Moravian missionaries’ personal and emotional engagements with the people they sought to convert impacted not only on their understanding of Christianity, but also caused them to rethink the nature of civilization and humanity in light of their frontier experiences. In this article I discuss the construction of ‘savagery’ in the mission ethnography of C. G. A. Oldendorp (1721–87). Oldendorp’s journey to slave-holding societies in the Danish West Indies, where Moravian missions had been established in the 1730s, and his own experiences of the violence of these societies had such an impact on him that his proto-ethnographic descriptions of all the inhabitants of the Danish West Indies – from slaves to slaveholders – broke with traditional representations of savagery. He suggested two different paths for emotional transformation: one for slaves, and another for slaveholders. His views aligned with those of the later abolitionists, yet he was writing sixty years before those movements first gained public momentum in Great Britain. In many ways, therefore, this early mission ethnography reshaped contemporary understandings of ‘savagery’. I consider how Oldendorp did this in relation to a Moravian theology of the heart and love of Christ, the emerging Scottish Enlightenment philosophy of ‘love of humanity’ and its use in colonial encounters between missionaries and local people, and especially the emotions that were provoked by the extreme violence of the slavery system in this colonial contact zone.

THE PERSONAL ACCOUNT BOOKS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam McKinstry ◽  
Marie Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Accounting Education ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Personal Account ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Financial Arrangements

This study examines the personal account books of Sir Walter Scott, the world-renowned Scottish author, a topic not explored before by Scott scholars or accounting historians. It sets the account books in the context of Scott's accounting education and experience, which took place at the time of the Scottish Enlightenment, an 18th century movement which saw a great flowering of writings on accountancy in Scotland as well as considerable progress in the arts and sciences. The style, layout and content of the account books is also studied from the point of view of elucidating Scott's domestic financial arrangements and expenditure patterns. These are seen as confirming the insights of Vickery [1998], who posits a liberated role for women such as Mrs Scott in ‘genteel’ households, which Scott's undoubtedly was. The study also establishes that Scott's personal expenditures, and indeed his accounting practices, otherwise conformed to the general patriarchal pattern identified by Davidoff and Hall [1987]. The final part of the article uses what has been discovered about Scott's personal accounting to revisit the question of his financial imprudence (or otherwise) in business. It concludes that Scott's risk-taking in business was not unreasonable, and was informed by his bookkeeping knowledge and practices.

Population and the Stages of Growth

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. W. Rostow
Keyword(s):  
David Hume ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Balance Sheet ◽  
National Income ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future

Hamish McRae's The World in 2020 begins its discussion of population with this blunt sentence: "Of all the forces that will change the world over the next generation, demography is probably the most important." 1 agree. After all, men, women, and children determine the demand for things; men and women determine the size of the workforce; and if the supply of goods and services they produce and export is not adequate, people go hungry, lack medical services, and all too often perish too young. The rhythm of human life is such that those who are born now will, by and large, live through the middle of the next century. We owe them some things. However, as this chapter argues, the future is complicated by more than simply the rate of increase of the population. There are those who do not trace the beginning of modern economics to David Hume, Adam Smith, and their colleagues in the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century. They prefer the "Political Arithmeticians"— the statisticians—of the late 17th century, the greatest of whom was William Petty. Petty ranged widely over the field of economics including some wise and subtle reflections on the role of minorities in international trade. In 1695, Gregory King estimated the national accounts of England and Wales as of 1688. He used, essentially, a modern balance-sheet method, demonstrating the relationships between output and expenditure for five sectors of the economy. But it was John Gaunt as early as 1662 who cast the longest shadow on the future with his estimates of death rates in London based on the bills of mortality. His work is the beginning of modem demography. What stirred these late-17th-century inquiries? It was not a precocious academic interest in measuring population and national income; it was a sense that the nations of Europe were emerging from the feudal past and its internal struggles for power into an international arena of hostility and combat. In the following century, Britain and France, for example, were at war for more than 43 years.

‘I am greatly obliged to the Dutch’: James Beattie's Dutch Connection

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-90
Author(s):  
Joost Hengstmengel
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Honorary Member ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Common Sense Philosophy ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Enlightenment Philosophy

In the second half of the 18th century, Scottish Enlightenment philosophy spread to the Dutch Republic, where it found a favourable reception. The most popular Scottish philosopher among Dutch intellectuals arguably was James Beattie of Aberdeen. Almost all of his prose works were translated into Dutch, and the Zeeland Society of Sciences elected him a foreign honorary member. It made Beattie remark that he was ‘greatly obliged to the Dutch’, and a Dutch learned journal that he had ‘in a sense become a native’. This article discusses why precisely the Dutch got interested in Beattie and what made his common sense philosophy appealing to a Dutch audience. It argues that it was the moderate and non-speculative nature of Beattie's moral philosophy that fitted well with the eclecticism of the Dutch Enlightenment.

The ‘Glaring’ Place of Prepositions

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nuria Yáñez-Bouza
Keyword(s):  
Special Reference ◽  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
New Rhetoric ◽  
Preposition Stranding

Summary This paper offers new insights into the 18th-century normative tradition, with special reference to the stigmatisation of preposition stranding. It brings to light the role of Scottish codifiers in contrast to English codifiers: works written by Scots contain more critical comments on the use of end-placed prepositions both quantitatively (in terms of frequency) and qualitatively (more semantic nuances and more condemnatory epithets). The semantic analysis of the data rules out the hypothesis that Scottish authors might have been particularly sensible towards this construction because of its nature as ‘provincial English’ or as a ‘Scotticism’. Rather, the author suggests that it was the ‘New Rhetoric’ movement (1748–1793) in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment that played a vital role in its stigmatisation. The importance of rhetoric as a facet of 18th-century prescriptivism, complementary to grammar, is thus put under the spotlight.

EPITAFIES OF THE RELATIVES OF HADJI IBRAHIM AL-URADI AS A SOURCE ON THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE SCIENTIST AND ON THE HISTORY OF GIDATL

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-21
Author(s):  
Sh M Khapizov ◽  
M G Shekhmagomedov
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
The Past ◽  
Arabic Script ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Culture ◽  
The Look ◽  
Cultural Monuments ◽  
Written Sources

The article is devoted to the study of inscriptions on the gravestones of Haji Ibrahim al-Uradi, his father, brothers and other relatives. The information revealed during the translation of these inscriptions allows one to date important events from the history of Highland Dagestan. Also we can reconsider the look at some important events from the past of Hidatl. Epitaphs are interesting in and of themselves, as historical and cultural monuments that needed to be studied and attributed. Research of epigraphy data monuments clarifies periodization medieval epitaphs mountain Dagestan using record templates and features of the Arabic script. We see the study of medieval epigraphy as one of the important tasks of contemporary Caucasian studies facing Dagestani researchers. Given the relatively weak illumination of the picture of events of that period in historical sources, comprehensive work in this direction can fill gaps in our knowledge of the medieval history of Dagestan. In addition, these epigraphs are of great importance for researchers of onomastics, linguistics, the history of culture and religion of Dagestan. The authors managed to clarify the date of death of Ibrahim-Haji al-Uradi, as well as his two sons. These data, the attraction of written sources and legends allowed the reconstruction of the events of the second half of the 18th century. For example, because of the epidemic of plague and the death of most of the population of Hidatl, this society noticeably weakened and could no longer maintain its influence on Akhvakh. The attraction of memorable records allowed us to specify the dates of the Ibrahim-Haji pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, as well as the route through which he traveled to these cities.

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