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The focus of this study is on the challenges faced by the municipal government of early modern Edinburgh in attempting to regulate suburban work. It has been demonstrated that as taxation became more common in the Scottish capital, certain occupational groups attempted to avoid the monetary burdens by settling outside the town walls, beyond the reach of burgh jurisdiction. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the town council struggled to gain legal “superiority” over these constantly growing suburbs. This in turn led the Edinburgh craft guilds to seek superiority over their suburban counterparts. The effects of this process are highlighted by evidence from the surviving minute books of the metalworkers’ guilds, in both the capital and its suburbs, illuminating the struggle of a European capital to control the urban expansion beyond its jurisdiction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the decline of Scottish Conservatism, 1951-97. The statistical data indicate that 91 percent of the variance in Tory support is accounted for by an underlying negative trend against time, that similar patterns appear when the data is disaggregated by region, and that short-term fluctuations have been more in conformity with English results than is conventionally understood. The process of generational change is seen as a waning of the cultural conditions which produced the centre-right coalition that dominated Scottish politics, 1931-64, and its fragmentation into Conservatism, Liberalism, and Scottish Nationalism. The changed circumstances are not seen as peculiarly Scottish, but the consequences for Scottish Conservatism of an evolution affecting the centre-right across the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]