In its December 1786 issue, James Sibbald's Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany reprinted an article with a familiar theme. Scotland, it explained, was in the midst of a profound experience of change. A vast, integrated system of cause and effect was making swift headway, since ‘improvements of every kind make a more rapid progress, and are more discernible in countries though not entirely rude, yet but little cultivated’ – just as ‘loam or marle, or any other manure, operates more quickly and with greater effect on new than on old ground’. Signs of backwardness ‘in agriculture, commerce, and the mechanical arts’ were being erased in a nation once populated by the ‘singular spectacle’ of ‘religious and learned barbarians’. At the same time, England's ‘rural and bashful sister’ was now acquiring ‘all the arts and fashions of modish life’. The piece congratulated the Scottish aristocracy on their support of progress as ‘improvement’, proceeding to detail a whole variety of contexts in which this supreme narrative was apparent, from trade and infrastructure to law, politics and manners. This all combined to secure the axiom of ‘a mutual action and reaction between industry, property, and a spirit of liberty’, said to ‘naturally support and promote each other’.

Such improving latitude echoed a mainstream Enlightenment perspective with roots stretching back into the previous century. Yet visions of improvement were rarely without complications. Four and a half decades later, in January 1831, an uncredited reprint in a small Galloway periodical, the Castle-Douglas Weekly Visitor and Literary Miscellany, was articulating a very different view. ‘In our endeavours towards the reformation of our manners and sentiments, we have erred in the same way as respecting our external circumstances’, it lamented. ‘Instead of correcting only what was amiss, and supplying what was defective, we have gone on indiscriminately reversing and changing, till what commenced in improvement had ended in deterioration.’

The concept of improvement existed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a series of dialectical relationships encompassing both theory and practice, in a collision between – at its most basic – the old and the new, a key component of the culture of modernity.