Roots of 1790s Radicalism: Reviewing the Economic and Social Background

While the essays do not present a single, uniform view of the period, many of them point to the conclusion that accounts of Scotland in this period which emphasize stability and the weakness of the radical challenge underestimate at the very least the potential for instability and disorder in this period, and have served to mask a series of powerful dissident voices. They show that the stability which many historians have discerned in retrospect was, in short, not what struck most contemporaries, whose experience of the decade was one of successive and cumulative strains and challenges.