That social change lay at the heart of the Industrial Revolution has been argued by a long line of historians. It can encompass a remarkably wide range of human experience. The main focus of this chapter will be the ascendancy of market relations both within and beyond the workplace. This, it will be argued, provides a particularly apposite means of understanding the nature of the Industrial Revolution in Scotland. The chapter however will also examine linked issues such as the standard of living and the role of women and children, although it should be noted that in these and other relevant areas of social change in Scotland in this period - crime and popular culture for example - only minimal research has been carried out. Owing to limitations of space the complex question of class will be skirted around.

As was noted earlier, in early modem Scotland where rural links were stronger and more widespread and most households had at least a scrap of ground for personal use, ‘life-time labour was relatively less important’ than in England [157: 25]. The situation described towards the end of chapter 2, with Scotland having achieved by the later 1840s the status of an industrial nation, makes it clear that during the previous century or so profound social changes must have been taking place, in both the distribution of the population and the nature of the workforce.

Reference has already been made to the rate of urban growth in Scotland in the eighteenth century. By 1800 Scotland had risen to fifth place in the European urban league and was second only to England and Wales by 1850. Whereas England's urban growth in the eighteenth century was rapid but continuous and protracted, Scotland's was ‘abrupt and swift’ [75]. Nowhere was this more so than in Glasgow, which by 1821 had overtaken Edinburgh and become the second most populous city in Britain outside London. Between 1801 and 1851 Glasgow grew more rapidly than any of the other major towns. The other early pacemakers in urban Scotland after c.1750 were also commercial and manufacturing towns such as Paisley, Kilmarnock and Falkirk, the slowest growing of which more than tripled its population between c.1750 and 1821 [75:35].