| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Richard Rodger. The Transformation of Edinburgh: Land, Property and Trust in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2001. Pp. xix, 540. $80.00.

The population of Edinburgh spiraled upward from approximately 80,000 at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a quarter of a million in 1900. Between 1810 and the early 1840s, growth rates oscillated between a dizzying two and three percent per annum. Widely depicted as a city of middle-class dilettantes, intellectuals, and lawyers—a sharp-tongued observer in the 1840s lampooned a "huge manufactory of litigation" (p. 20)—in reality Edinburgh depended heavily on industry and commerce. As Richard Rodger demonstrates, eighty percent of the adult male population and between thirty-five and forty-five percent of the female labor force worked in these linked sectors. Between 1870 and the outbreak of World War I, however, an administrative revolution ensured that "commercial clerk" became the dominant category for men and the second most significant, after domestic service, for women. 1

Having established basic demographic, socioeconomic and institutional contexts, Rodger engages key relationships among business, property, and society from the late medieval period to the heyday of "Victorian feudalism" and decisively establishes that the Scots relied on cultural and legal vocabularies quite different to those current south of the border. Readers wishing to engage with the full significance of these differences will need to possess a working knowledge of "feu" and "feuing." Fortunately, these forbidding terms—as well as the even more arcane "duplicands," "irritancy," and "sub-infeudation"—are repeatedly reintroduced and redefined at different points in the argument. Suffice it to say, within the compass of a brief review, that in Scotland "land was feued—sold outright by the vendor who relinquished all title to it, subject to the receipt of a fixed annual levy (feu-duty) in perpetuity, and other occasional payments" (p. 70). . . .

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