Alongside Gibbon and Hume, William Robertson was the most popular British historian of the 18th century. A key figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, Robertson was both leader of the Moderate Party in the Church of Scotland and principal of the University of Edinburgh. A prominent debater, Robertson's importance has emerged again in the light of original research 200 years after his death in 1793. This 12-volume set incorporates Robertson's final corrections and revisions for each of the four histories and the published sermon. Besides the major works, the set includes miscellaneous writings and speeches by Robertson and several biographical and critical works about him taken from scarce pamphlets and periodicals. With new introductions, including one on Robertson as historian, and the other providing a biographical and bibliographical commentary, this set should be useful to scholars of historiography and the social, ecclesiastical and intellectual history of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Originally published in 1993, this collection of essays, all by pre-eminent exponents of the history of political thought, explores the political ideologies of early modern Britain. Organised on a broadly chronological basis, the topics addressed by individual scholars reflect in general the themes initiated and inspired by the work of the distinguished intellectual historian J. G. A. Pocock, for whom the collection is intended as a tribute. Each of the sixteen contributors have thought long and critically about Pocock's seminal contributions to the subject, and in each essay they engage with the debates he has provoked. As a fitting conclusion to the volume, Professor Pocock responds to the essays and provided his personal interpretation of the themes they invoke.

This collection of essays, all by preeminent exponents of the history of political thought, explores the political ideologies of early modern Britain. Organized on a broadly chronological basis, the topics addressed by individual scholars reflect in general the themes initiated and inspired by the work of the distinguished intellectual historian, J. G. A. Pocock, for whom the collection is intended as a tribute. Each of the sixteen contributors have thought long and critically about Pocock's seminal contributions to the subject, and in each essay engages with the debates he has provoked. Professor Pocock has responded to the essays and provided his personal interpretation of the themes they invoke.

Adam Smith is celebrated all over the world as the author of The Wealth of Nations and the founder of modern economics. A few of his ideas - such as the 'Invisible Hand' of the market - have become icons of the modern world. Yet Smith saw himself primarily as a philosopher rather than an economist, and would never have predicted that the ideas for which he is now best known were his most important. This book, by one of the leading scholars of the Scottish Enlightenment, shows the extent to which The Wealth of Nations and Smith's other great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, were part of a larger scheme to establish a grand 'Science of Man', one of the most ambitious projects of the European Enlightenment, which was to encompass law, history and aesthetics as well as economics and ethics. Nicholas Phillipson reconstructs Smith's intellectual ancestry and formation, of which he gives a radically new and convincing account. He shows Smith's interactions with the rapidly changing and subtly different intellectual and commercial cultures of Glasgow and Edinburgh as they entered the great years of the Scottish Enlightenment. Above all he explains how far Smith's ideas developed in dialogue with those of his closest friend, the other titan of the age, David Hume. This superb biography is now the one book which anyone interested in the founder of economics must read.

From a small city college in the sixteenth century the University of Edinburgh grew to be one of the world's greatest centres of scholarship, research and learning. Its history is told here by three of its leading historians with wit, verve and style. Copiously illustrated in colour and black and white, this is a book for everyone concerned with the university or the city of Edinburgh to read and enjoy. The authors consider the impacts of Reformation, Union with England, Enlightenment, and scientific and industrial revolutions. They show the university rising to the challenge of competition from Europe, describe the great periods of expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and chart the university's building from Old College to George Square. They explore its tense relationship with the city, explore the histories of student outrage and unrest, recall the days when blasphemy could be punished by death, and reveal that the university's department of anatomy once supported a thriving trade in body-snatching. Upheaval and crisis, triumph and achievement succeed each other by turns in a story that is entertaining, intriguing and surprising -- and always interesting.