Enlightenment in a Smart City

Murray Pittock MAE FRSE is Bradley Professor and Pro Vice-Principal at the University of Glasgow, and Scotland’s leading cultural historian. A prizewinner of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy, he has held visiting appointments or spoken at the universities of UC Berkeley, Boston, Cambridge, Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, UCL, New York University, Notre Dame, Oslo, Oxford, the Sorbonne, Virginia, Yale, Gresham College, the British Academy, The British Museum, Hampton Court, the Smithsonian, the House of Commons and many other locations. He is the General Editor of the Collected Works of Allan Ramsay.

• AcknowledgementsChapter 1: Remembering and Inventing EnlightenmentChapter 2: Edinburgh and the Canongate 1660-1750: communications, networks, the routers of changeChapter 3: Trades and ProfessionsChapter 4: The ArtsChapter 5: Taverns, Associations and FreemasonryChapter 6: Booksellers, Newspapers and LibrariesBibliographyIndex

The book offers such an all-encompassing, interdisciplinary narrative that there is something here for everyone. In scale and price, this is an introduction for both general readers and academics - a must for every tea table (or should that be desktop?). Title and text use contemporary terms such as smart, connectivity, router, and node presenting the development of Edinburgh in terms of modern communications systems... If an Edinburgh museum or gallery should ever wish to display the Enlightenment, the scholarship in this book and its author's deep knowledge of the subject would provide a platform from which to immerse visitors.