ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the Early Modern Scottish family imagined and defined itself, and looks especially at the key concepts of blood, property and affection as ties that bound the family together. It highlights the central role that emotion played in tying families together and producing lineage, with emotion, in different forms, embedded into legal, social, cultural and economic structures. The chapter argues that family heritage, and the nation it underpins, was and is produced through a lineage of affection. The importance of affection to understandings of family identity placed emotion at the heart of family lineage, requiring even extended family members to show affection towards each other. Emotion, economy and family were drawn together in Scots through the use of the word ‘kind’ to mean arising from kin. Emotion was not only embedded within family relationships, but questions of property and lineage that arose from kin connections.
