ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches the beginnings of efforts to identify, privilege and stabilise Scotland as a distinct economic entity, and also tries to establish what leading Scottish economic intellectuals talked about before they talked about “the economy”. The first section outlines the background to this perspective in previous imaginings of Scotland’s industrial future built around the Empire and individualism. Subsequent sections examine the uneven origins of regional policy and the role of Thomas Johnston, the ambitious Scottish Secretary of State widely associated with planning, and show how his project was frustrated. It then examines the first efforts at statistical analysis of the Scottish economy, since this provides the main way in which economic units take on the aura of scientific objects and thus they become central to the “imagining” of economic nations. In this case, we are largely concerned with the apparent absence of statistics. Then the Toothill Report, perhaps the most famous economic report in Scottish history, which crystallises a move in regional policy away from “black spot” perspectives onto a “growth” perspective emphasising inward investment. Lastly, inward investment, which emerges as the ultimate go-to solution for Scotland’s structural problem.
