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The collapse of the ambitious and experimental Ayr Bank (Douglas, Heron & Co.) was the central episode of the 1772–3 British credit crisis and served as a direct influence on Adam Smith's monetary analysis in the Wealth of Nations. This article identifies the issuance of redeemable annuities in response to the bank's stop of payments in June 1772 and the distressed nature of its asset liquidations afterwards as the main reasons behind the size of its losses. It furthermore uses primary manuscript evidence to reconstruct and extend the existing narrative of this famous episode, from the planning stages in 1773 while the bank was still fighting for its survival, to the retirement of its banknotes by the Edinburgh public banks in 1773–4, the legal and political manoeuvring behind the redemption of the annuities by Act of Parliament in 1774, and the over 40 years of asset unwinding that followed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Eighteenth-century architect-builders were a small group, but important for understanding the market strategies of knowledge-based experts in an age of rapid growth in technical information before the creation of modern professions. This article confronts a teleological historiography of emerging professionalization. It is focused on Robert Mylne and several of his contemporaries in Edinburgh and London, including a number of successful London-based Scots who were active as architects, builders, engineers, and surveyors, and self-styled in all these areas when it suited them. It supplies an account of what it took for building experts to establish themselves and flourish in big cities and the ways in which such experts navigated, controlled, and accommodated an environment of unregulated expertise that largely suited contemporary practitioners. Individual, family, and collective market strategies are examined in detail and the final section is a close analysis of the activities of the Architects Club in the 1790s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]