The spatial development of Scotland in the first industrial revolution: Evidence from the Statistical Accounts

In 1790, Sir John Sinclair began the work which would lead to the publication of the Statistical Account of Scotland in 1796. Sinclair self-consciously sought to gather information concerning the economic and social conditions in Scotland. In this sketch, which outlines preliminary work intended to apply novel techniques of spatial econometrics to Sinclair’s data and other sources using a similar methodology from the early 19th century that have already been used extensively by social historians, we demonstrate that it is possible to extract empirical data, and to subject it to analysis in ways that allow us to make inferences about the nature of spatial relations within population data.