Industrial Transport and Political Economy in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine

Abstract:The economic and cultural debates animating the early years of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine coincided with a period of rapid network integration as omnibus and carriage companies, mail coaches and steamboats, turnpikes and canals, came together to produce a cohesive transit system for people, goods, and information driving the Scottish and British economies. In this context, Blackwood's brand of Scottish nationalism in both the cultural and the economic realms appears less a counter to than a product of increasingly integrated interurban transport systems, and even as a consequence of the transition to a mineral-based energy economy.