|
|
Article: Scotland
- Article from:
- Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
SCOTLAND
SCOTLAND.
In 1500 Scotland was a small, poor, and peripheral country on the northern fringe of Europe. Its economy was largely agricultural, its religion unremarkably Catholic, its political leanings toward France, its military and commercial significance minor, its people largely illiterate. By 1800 Scotland was a European leader in the fields of agriculture and commerce; it had long been self-consciously, perhaps aggressively, Protestant; its philosophers had changed the face of European thought; its inhabitants, by now among the best educated in Europe, saw themselves as Scots, but also as Britons; its people, practices, and ideas had left a stamp on the whole British, ...