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This work is both a family history and a social history of Scotland seen against a city, Edinburgh, acity that to this day is soured by class divisions. In tracing the family back several centuries, the book embeds their lives into the larger forces shaping the Scottish culture, climaxing in the creation of the New Town of Edinburgh – one of the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s extravagant romantic fantasies. The New Town produced a reality, shaped by the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment, which gave identity to a capital of a nation in name only, after the closing of the Scottish parliament with the Union of the Crowns in 1707.
"Balfour has an impressive record of writing architectural history; his book on Berlin is magnificent, and he does not disappoint here. Here is an architectural history, written by an expert, writing about ‘his’ city, the one which formed him. He takes an orthodoxy, telling Edinburgh’s architectural story and threads it through his family narrative. Hard to do; but he succeeds" — David McCrone, The University of Edinburgh.
Prologue; I Poverty, Filth and Bondage; II Ambition; III The New Town of Edinburgh.; IV The New Society; V Building Status; VI The Other New Town; VII Into The Twentieth Century; VIII Reflections; VIII Methods and Sources; Bibliography