ABSTRACT
The growth of family history has also been hampered by the relatively late development of social history in Scotland, especially for the pre-industrial period. Despite the publication of Smout’s pioneering work, A History of the Scottish People 1560-1830 in 1969, Scottish history in the following decade remained primarily concerned with issues of national identity and politics. Few historians followed Smout’s lead, although English population studies inspired the work of Michael Flinn and other demographers.4 Karen Cullen’s study in this volume builds on these
1 T.C. Smout, A Century of the Scottish People (London, 1986), p. 292. 2 Examples include Lynn Abrams, The Orphan Country: children of Scotland’s broken
homes from 1845 to the present day (Edinburgh, 1998); Andrew Blaikie, ‘Unhappy After Their Own Fashion: infant lives and family biographies in southwest Scotland, 1855-1939,’ Scottish Economic and Social History 18:2 (1998), pp. 95-113; articles in a special family history issue of ST, ed. Janay Nugent, 27 (2002). For an illustration of how the history of the family can enrich modern Scottish history, see Eleanor Gordon, ‘The Family,’ in Gender in Scottish History Since 1700, eds Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Deborah Simonton and Eileen Yeo (Edinburgh, 2006), pp. 235-67.
