Sir Walter Dundas of that ilk (1562–1636) was a politically prominent laird who represented Linlithgowshire numerous times in parliament, served as its sheriff and was convener of the county's commissioners of the peace. He was also a diligent manager of his estates. His surviving estate records, while sometimes frustratingly fragmentary, contain a wealth of material that sheds light on how agriculture was overseen on a lowland Scottish estate in the early seventeenth century.

Dundas's lands, spread across five neighbouring parishes (Abercorn, Dalmeny, Linlithgow, Livingston and Kirkliston), included some of the best arable land in Scotland. Previous research has shown that, by the middle of the seventeenth century, the mains of Dundas (the farmland directly worked for the laird) was intensively cultivated, with an unusually high proportion of wheat grown alongside oats and bere, as well as significant quantities of legumes, the nitrogen-fixing properties of which permitted even more intensive cultivation. That intensity is demonstrated by the fact that around 85 per cent of the mains was under cultivation every year. Only a relatively small proportion of that land (c.30 per cent) was designated as outfield, and even that was relatively intensively cultivated with more than half of it under crops, compared to the norm of around one-third. The estate has been the subject of detailed research, largely focused on the period from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards, so an examination of earlier records has the potential to provide further insights into a period of Scottish agricultural history that remains largely unexplored.

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This study is based on a number of surviving estate records which suggest that, by the early seventeenth century, cultivation on the mains of Dundas was already a highly-organised operation. Its detailed records comprehend a whole range of activities including the sowing, harvesting, storage and disbursement of crops, as well as expenditure on labour, infrastructure and equipment. While there are few long sequences of any particular type of record, those that are preserved give a strong impression of systematic record-keeping. The extent to which this was typical for its time has yet to be clearly established, although there is no particular reason to suppose that Dundas was unique.

Lödöse museum is situated on the west coast of Sweden, a few miles north of Gothenburg. During the twelfth century Lödöse was the site of one of the first medieval towns in Sweden. Archaeologists have uncovered more than half a million objects during the past century, making Lödöse one of the richest sites in Sweden when it comes to medieval finds. Most of the finds are common items from everyday life, but after nearly a millennium in the muddy soil, they are not so common anymore. They now tell the story of the people who lived before us. Runic messages with warnings, promises of friendship and love, give life to the past. Names carved into tools tell us who once used and cherished the items a long time ago (Fig. 11.1).

Lödöse Museum also holds a vast collection of organic materials from medieval Sweden, dating from AD 1000 to 1350. In this collection there are approximately 1,700 registered textile finds, ranging from coarse packing textile to the finest cloth and silk lining. One of those finds is a nalbound mitten from the thirteenth century (Fig. 11.2). The mitten was found in 1972 alongside a house wall in the centre of Lödöse, approximately two metres underground. It is made in two different stitches, one of which is not certainly identified, and the other identified as the Asle stitch. The mitten is very well preserved, with only minor damage.

This nalbound mitten was the centre of attention and the starting point for a course called ‘From wool to mitten’, carried out at Lödöse museum during 2017. The course was open to the public and arranged by Lödöse museum in collaboration with ‘Vinterverkstan’, a small Swedish handicraft supply company. Liselotte Ohrling holds a Master's degree in archaeology and works as a museum teacher at Lödöse museum. She teaches skills such as medieval dancing, spinning and nalbinding. ‘Vinterverkstan’ is run by Anna Josefsson. Through ‘Vinterverkstan’, she supplies craft materials and training courses in nalbinding, spinning and other crafts.

This chapter examines farming in the old counties of Stirling and Clackmannan with some contiguous areas of Perthshire but excluding the Highland area around Ben Lomond. It includes the carselands of the Forth Valley, the Ochils and parts of the Fintry Hills. Variations in ecology throughout this region, compounded by differences in tenure, communications, capitalisation and other human factors, contributed to a wide range of farming economies. Change accelerated in all zones in the 1750s but was certainly not new. Whilst recognising that there were many barriers to change – including climate and warfare – the emphasis here is on specific and local changes and the impediments hindering decisive transformation. We are rightly warned against using the ‘argument from example’ to overstate the changes before 1750. So this chapter asks: ‘What were the signs of change before 1750?’ The answers suggest that we also need to avoid dismissing earlier changes as merely preparatory for ‘real’ change later.

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Contemporaries divided the region into carse, dryfield and muir. The carse – below about 30m, beside the River Forth – and the dryfield (between carse and muir) were the main arable zones. Above 100m or so was primarily pastoral, though arable was found to c.350m. ‘The Crucks of the Forth are worth an Earldom in the North’, was a ‘Common saying’ in 1706, underlining the fertility of the eastern carselands. But the carse clay had some sandier areas, some wet meadows and areas of raised peat bog and salt grass. West of Stirling, with higher rainfall and later harvests, very similar soils produced lower-quality grains, and there was more emphasis on dairying. The dryfield soils varied from sandy to heavy clays, and were also of very variable aspect and slope. There were bogs and woodlands, and the zone was intersected by streams. Perhaps half the dryfield was pasture, rocks or braes, or covered with whins (gorse) or broom. The hill pastures were also a mosaic. For example, Sheriffmuir provided common grazing for the farms of Strathallan but also peat, turf, limestone, heather and rushes for thatch, essential resources for farms on the lower ground. Above the head dykes of the muir, herds named around forty features – peat workings, lime kilns, standing stones, streams; and the head dykes were themselves being pushed up, onto former muir, before 1750.

Thus noted Werner Sombart, one of Germany's most influential thinkers on capitalism at the time (alongside Max Weber), in his study on Der Bourgeois in 1913. Sombart's emphasis on Scotland seems striking only inasmuch as recent global histories of capitalism, industrialisation and modern economic growth have usually been written from a perspective focusing on either England (or certain regions within England) or the Netherlands as norm template proxies for ‘Western Europe’, when studying the so-called ‘Great Divergence’ and processes of global economic modernisation. The small northern presbyterian nation is

usually left out of the picture, including studies taking an expressly ‘British’ perspective. Just consider pars pro toto the signature and flagship project ‘Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain’: even though the second edition (2004) did feature a chapter on Scotland written by Devine, the editors of the third edition (2018) decided to leave that chapter out again; the first edition had contained no such chapter, either, conceived in the usual imperial or Anglocentric epistemic perspective. Most accounts of British economic growth in historical perspective to the present day either omit or – even worse – extrapolate Scotland after 1707, often inferring Scottish gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates by using (constant) population ratios. To the present day we lack estimates for Scottish GDP after 1707 of the sort that have been produced for England since the eleventh century using various (and changing) econometric techniques.

This is a more than sad – albeit still common – omission. Sombart, dismissing Catholic Ireland (‘Down to this very day there is scarcely another land which has been so little affected by the capitalist spirit’), thought that Scotland had even influenced England in the development of capitalism: ‘the course of capitalist development in England was greatly influenced by the fortunes of the capitalist spirit in the Northern Kingdom’.

Migration, both internal and external, has been an essential part of the history of Ethiopia. Although internal migration has historically been fundamental in shaping the fabric of Ethiopian society, migration across national borders is nonetheless gaining momentum, especially in the last fifty or so years. What began as a trickle in the early twentieth century has now become a veritable surge. According to current estimates, over 2.5 million Ethiopians live outside the country itself. If we are to include second- and third-generation Ethiopian descendants, that number is likely double. The change taking place in Ethiopian migration at present is not limited to the scale, scope, or destinations of migration, although each is significant in its own right. This change also includes the nature of Ethiopian transnational migration, from what was essentially seasonal or transient to one that has increasingly become permanent. We cannot move forward in our understanding of this multifaceted phenomenon without undertaking a retrospective analysis, identifying lacunas and theoretical contributions that go beyond specific case studies.

Migration results from a range of different types of economic, social, and political changes. As a series of sometimes contradictory processes, migration cannot be separated from its effects and causes, which touch upon every aspect of human life. In the Ethiopian context, successive waves of internal and external mobility were largely a response to changes in the country's political economy: a fundamentally feudal mode of production was replaced by one that was socialist, which, in turn, was succeeded by a developmental stage that combined a market economy with an interventionist state. Migration was negotiated at every historical point, demonstrating coexisting and sometimes contradictory social conditions. To some, migration has become a central fact of life. At times, it has become an apt response to uncertainties, sometimes better than the unappealing certainty of staying put. In other cases, migration equates to expulsion, a coerced act resulting from pressures enacted by powerful macro actors, such as the state.

The Ethiopian diaspora is both extensive and diverse, and Ethiopia itself is one of the largest African sources of transnational migrants. Moreover, Ethiopia both sends migrants and receives them as a transit nation (particularly for refugee populations from Eritrea, Somalia, and South Sudan). These various migrations have implications for questions of nation-state building, ethnonational identity, socioeconomic development, gendered interactions, social stratification, and much more.

Sheep have been exploited, developed, and moved across vast areas since the Bronze Age. Milk led to domestication but changes to the coat of early sheep increased the amount of wool fibre and altered the quality of fleece each animal produced. Wool became a valuable economic product and breeding responded to market forces. Some breeds were raised primarily for wool, others for milk or meat, a process that continually led to changes in sheep breeds.

Product specialisation in sheep breeds was not desirable everywhere. In the far northwest fringe of Europe, characteristics found in wild sheep such as horns, a moulting fleece and hairy wool that were being eradicated elsewhere were kept. These traits were beneficial for sheep in this environment and useful to their owners. People in northern latitudes required sheep that could be relied on to produce a range of quality products and remain viable to reproduce a healthy new generation. This was particularly important for adventurers, explorers and settlers who set off from their Scandinavian homeland to establish a new life in the North Atlantic. Subsistence agropastoralism relied on versatility, not specialisation, and influenced sheep husbandry strategies and breeding.

The regular presence of caprine remains at Viking and medieval farm sites in the North Atlantic region indicates the importance of sheep and goat rearing. Archaeological investigations into farm and livestock management have regularly focused on caprines primarily as producers of milk and secondarily for meat and hides. Recent attention has begun to focus on wool, not only milk and meat, as a necessary and valuable raw material for living in the northern marine environment. The majority of cloth for clothing, bedding and other textiles needed by the household, farm and community, including cloth for shipbuilding and haulage, came primarily from sheep. Wool became increasingly important by the medieval period, when it also was used to pay tithes, taxes, rents and wages.

The present analysis considers sheep as a living source of wool for textile making in the areas settled by Scandinavians, beginning with the Viking diaspora in the eighth century (Fig. 1.1).