ABSTRACT
It sometimes helps to look at the world from the perspectives of those living in the eighteenth century. If you were a Scot in the very north of the country or in Aberdeen, your closest foreign neighbors were the equally poor and sometimes more backward Norwegians and Danes. The sailing times from Aberdeen to prosperous Holland were less than to London. Paris was often as close as the English capital. If one went down the coast to Edinburgh, the time to Holland would be cut a bit but London was still about as far away. From the west of Scotland it made sense to send south Lanarkshire lead pigs bound for Holland to Leith because the sailing times from the west were too great. Glasgow was closer to France than to the Netherlands. It looked west to Ireland and to America. Virginia tobacco made a shorter and safer trip if landed in Glasgow than if it went to a merchant in London. Glasgow was as close to the French market as it was to London. Scots certainly went to England but for many their closest ties in 1700 were to the continent. That was particularly true of the professional classes who were often educated abroad.
