Charting Scottish politics and society from the defeat of the last Jacobite rebellion at Culloden in 1746, to the passing into law of the Scottish Reform Bill in July 1832 this book describes a period which saw the rise of some of the most influential thinkers of the contemporary world, as the Scottish Enlightenment reached and perhaps passed its peak, and a flourishing of imaginative literature from writers such as Walter Scott and James Hogg. Economically, the period saw unprecedented changes in the Lowlands and a transformation of Highland life as integration with England proved incompatible with an ancient culture and way of life.