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'tis, we musicians know, the C Major of this life. Paintings and museum reconstructions depicting the activities of medieval alchemists can easily give the wrong impression of the chemical knowledge of that period. Inanimate objects such as crystals are seen sharing shelves with the preserved bodies of small creatures, a common feature of the early laboratory. This could be taken to suggest that the scientists of those days had grasped the unity of chemistry: that in spite of great differences in their external appearance, Nature makes no distinction between chemical combinations in living and dead substances. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The universally held belief was that the matter contained in living organisms possessed an essential extra ingredient, a vital force, the mysterious origin of which was attributable to divine powers. This attitude was epitomized in the succinct classification to be found in the book Cours de Chyme, published by Nicholas Lemery in 1685. His division is still to be found in the standard first question of a popular parlour game: ‘animal, vegetable or mineral?’. By the end of the eighteenth century, the vital force theory was in rapid decline. Antoine Lavoisier, analyzing typical organic compounds, found them to contain inorganic substances such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, sulphur and phosphorus. The basic principles that govern chemical change, such as conservation of total mass, were being established during this period, and in 1844 Jöns Berzelius showed that they apply to all matter irrespective of whether it is inorganic or organic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Differences in the relative supply of labour, land, power and raw cotton differentiated the American from the British cotton industry and contributed to contrasting patterns of costs, technological development, productivity performance and business organisation. Before 1840 American cotton masters, in general, were faced with less plentiful and less elastic supplies of labour than their counterparts in Britain. Yet there were, nevertheless, sharp contrasts in the labour markets faced by the water-powered Lowell corporations in the 1820s and 1830s and those in urban centres such as Philadelphia, quite apart from the peculiarities of labour markets in the Southern states. Equally in Britain, although the factory system evolved against a background of relative labour surplus, there were imperfections in regional labour markets, especially where water power was used. Inevitably, therefore, in early industrialisation there emerged an array of labour and related technological strategies tailored to meet local, as opposed to purely national, conditions. Disparities in the evolution of business institutions, of technology and of product strategies cannot be understood exclusively in terms of differing price relativities. Similarly, national and regional dissimilarities in the development of labour management also need to be set in a wider context. The cultures and capabilities of family firms in the cotton industries of Britain and the United States were inseparable from their community cultures during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and this symbiosis extended to the management of labour. Thus networks that underpinned financial and commercial arrangements, on either side of the Atlantic, were also a feature of labour relations, the arrangement of work and of training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of West-Central Scotland must surely rank as the classic story of Scotland's economic history. The focus of activity is the Clyde, an extensive and sheltered maritime inlet well connected with the system of ‘western seaways’ which have been shown to be so crucial to an understanding of trade and migration in prehistoric and later times. Apart from its use for trade and commerce there were valuable natural resources in herring and salmon, and although medieval commerce was concentrated by law in the burghs fishing was open to all the coastal settlements. However, these advantages counted for little before the development of the Atlantic routes, conditioned by the colonisation of America and the removal of legal barriers to trade with English colonies by Scottish merchants in 1707, and before the technology of the industrial revolution had revealed tremendous possibilities which local entrepreneurs were ready to exploit. This transformation of regional potentials led not just to the dominance of the Clyde valley in Scottish economic affairs but to the emergence of Glasgow as the key city in this dynamic complex of industry and trade. ‘That the ecclesiastical burgh of Bishop Jocelin should attain such distinction would certainly have appeared incredible to the inhabitants of the older king's burghs of Rutherglen and Renfrew, and equally so to those of Dumbarton, the ancient and strategically situated capital of Strathclyde’. Yet by the end of the sixteenth century Glasgow had achieved greater taxable importance than her rivals in the west and was the second city in Scotland by 1670. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scotland made very substantial progress during the seventeenth century and the directions of future growth were becoming clearly established. There is some disagreement on the extent of Scotland's development as compared with that of England, but the achievement of a significant advance is hardly controversial. More clearly in dispute however was the wisdom of securing greater access to the English market through a full political union. Scotland's failure to improve her trading performance was underlined by the crushing failure of the colony on Darien ‘that could have been the trading hub of the world’. Yet the complete integration with England that would remove all legal barriers (imposed through the Navigation Acts) to trade with the English colonies was inhibited by the strong grass-roots nationalism deepened by English opposition to Scottish commercial initiatives. T. C. Smout explains that the main lines of Scottish economic progress were laid down in the seventeenth century through cattle, linen and tobacco but ‘almost all of them needed the Union if they were to lead to wealth’. This indicates that the events of 1707 were inevitable if Scottish commercial interests were to prosper, but were complemented by a strategic gain to England in eliminating the possibility of a foreign policy in the north that was detrimental to her interests on the continent. And both countries had a further interest in overcoming the problems of government arising from a union of crowns in the context of separate parliaments. But Scottish pride was at stake. The issues were plainly demonstrated in a flurry of legislation concerning the succession to Queen Anne in 1704–5: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

GENERAL Far and away the largest number of bills put into the Parliament concerned themselves with the common weal for which, in the Queen's view, it was the proper function of members of either House to propose action of one kind and another. In principle, nothing that touched the inhabitants of the realm in their daily lives stood outside the reforming, restricting or promoting powers of the Parliament, and in practice this principle was pretty consistently obeyed. The range of topics touched upon is remarkable, even if a majority of bills failed to get through, and some things thought of might amaze; indeed, the range is too wide to be fully recited here without burdening attention well beyond what it should be asked to bear. Acts did not often result from the more extravagant moves, few of which look likely to have been initiated by the government, but that does not diminish the interest of some initiatives. One bill that did pass in 1563 completed the sixteenth-century code against gypsies which had been officially begun in 1531 and elaborated in 1554. These alien ‘vagabonds’ caused fear and hatred, and typically enough each act got more savage. That of Henry VIII had attacked them for thieving and proposed to expel them, while the next one made it felony to be a wandering Egyptian. The act of 1563 worried about the Englishmen who dressed as gypsies in order to pursue a life of crime and added them to the tally, providing only that any native-born person found in such company could not be expelled from the realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]