All the papers published in this volume are based on original research, and they each present some fresh and intriguing perspectives on the dominant groups who have governed and influenced Scotland over the last three hundred years.
Those collected studies do not attempt to provide a coherent and systematic examination of the nation's urban and rural elites. That possibility is still a long way off. Research in this field, and especially the history of the dominant classes in Scottish cities and towns, is still in its very early stages and no convincing overview is yet feasible.
The contributors do attempt to provide an analysis of some key aspects of elite experience, and in the process they question much received historical wisdom.
Allan Macinnes presents a picture of land ownership in Argyllshire which is far removed from the stereotyped image of the Highland aristocracy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The papers by Graham Cummings and Tom Devine focus on landowners and tenant farmers in the age of agricultural transformation, while the final two papers on rural society by Iain Hutchison, David McCrone and Angela Morris return to the subject of the greater Scottish Landowners. Allan MacLaren, Irene Maver and Anthony Slaven provide pioneering discussions of urban professional and business elites.
