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A response to the other essays in "An Inventive Age," developing their ecocritical revision of the antagonism between an "organic" Romanticism and industrialism. Framing its argument around the failure of the Scottish Highlands to industrialize like other regions of Britain, the essay explores some different inflections to key contemporary terms like "industry," "invention," and "improvement" in Thomas Garnett's 1800 Tour of the Highlands. Notwithstanding Garnett's cameralist hopes for a mixed ecology of growth in the region, his Tour disguises the structural dependence of the Highland economy on West Indian wealth, with implications for the other essays in the special issue.

This article examines a Gaelic song written in 1816 in St. Lucia by a Scottish Gaelic-speaking army officer from Argyll, Dugald MacNicol (1791-1844), sketching MacNicol's life and military career in the Caribbean, in the Royal West Indian Rangers and later in the 1st Royals (Royal Scots Regiment), placing the song in relation to other Gaelic poems of emigration and exile, and printing a newly-edited text of MacNicol's song alongside the authors' English translation.

Ossian scholarship has moved beyond questions of forgery and authenticity to consider the poems’ international influence as a founding text of European Romanticism. Building on recent work in translation studies, this essay considers Ossian as the first substantial attempt to translate Gaelic poetry into English, exploring Macpherson’s relationship to his Gaelic sources, and his rejection of contemporary 18th century anglophone translation codes. Influenced by the theories of Hugh Blair and other members of the Scottish Enlightenment, Macpherson rendered traditional Gaelic heroic ballads in a highly figurative prose poetry, couched in the language of the sublime and the primitive. In conclusion, the essay turns to the posthumously published ‘Gaelic’ Ossian which turns out to be largely a back-translation of the 1760’s ‘English’ text. Yet Macpherson stimulated interest in Gaelic culture at a time of crisis, and his ‘foreignizing’ effect created an influential translation paradigm for Gaelic poetry and culture.

No abstract available.

If Ossian validated the Highland landscape for eighteenth-century tourists, the landscape, in turn, seemed to authenticate poems whose authenticity never ceased to be doubted; but text and topography alike ran the risk of dissolving into insubstantiality. Many tourists cited ‘local tradition’ in order to embroider existing (or to invent new) Fingalian place-names. Ranging over a wide variety of eighteenth-century travel-writers, this article casts new light on the relations between Ossian, travel-writing and Highland topography. It concludes by discussing the ‘fieldwork’ tradition of Ossianic tourism after 1800, which sought out local tradition bearers, rather than attempting to authenticate Macpherson's ‘translations’.

Becker (1964) at the University of Chicago originated the idea of human capital theory. In Becker’s understanding of the theory the individual is repositioned—as an actor in the social world—in the market of behaviors. According to his theory, as a rational actor, the individual optimizes his or her own “profit” by accumulating those behaviors and skills that make him or her more desirable on the market. At the heart of the theory lies the possibility of perfecting the human (Luke, 1997). By translating behavior into economic terms, human capital theory enabled the systematic application of economic theory to social issues, such as unemployment or the issue of minorities who dominated in lesser-skilled occupations. While this theory construes the individual in terms of two components, first, genetic endowment and second, acquired set of aptitudes (Besley & Peters, 2007), more emphasis in policy making has been placed on how best to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge and aptitudes. Education, training, and parenting under the influence of policies using human capital reasoning became aligned with market goals and applied market terms, such as investment, return, competition, and so on.