ABSTRACT
Almost half of the tax within the burgh during the first forty years of the century was paid by its merchant princes; they represented only one in every 200 of the burgh's inhabitants. Only a handful of Edinburgh's merchant princes employed resident factors in London, indicating that in general the majority of their business deals in that city, traditionally an environment hostile to Scottish merchants, were conducted through private business connections. An examination of the manufactory movement in early modern Scotland has concluded that few manufacturing enterprises of any note were established in early seventeenth-century Scotland; the establishment of even small-scale manufactories belonged, it was argued, rather to the post-Restoration economy. The last significant investment made in establishing industry by any of the burgh's merchant princes before the Wars of the Covenant was made by Patrick Wood, just months before his death in 1638.
