This is a social and cultural history of Scotland's industrial rise and relative decline, concerned above all with the leaders and workers (industrial, political, manufacturing, mining and engineering, as well as religious, union, educational and moral) who produced the first and suffered in the second. Political, social and economic events, movements and trends are welded together in a well-ordered and vivid narrative. It assumes almost no prior knowledge, and introduces the reader gently to the central debates about the nature and course of modern Scottish history. The style is clear and...