The historiography of the Financial Revolution in Scotland remains underdeveloped. This article addresses that gap by rounding out the rough sketch that currently represents our understanding of Scotland's Financial Revolution by focusing on the formation of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Scotland's first new financial institution in more than thirty years when it emerged in 1727. The case is made that the Scottish Financial Revolution was a complex movement, very often separated from the state and driven by the agency of Scotsmen at home and abroad, and that 1727 denoted a phase of the revolution in which financially innovative projects returned to the country after a period of absence. The article demonstrates how the progress of the Financial Revolution ebbed and flowed in the country, contingent upon political circumstances, from the nascent economic developments of the 1690s and on to the political upheaval of the early eighteenth century.

This article examines the Scottish Covenanters’ initiatives to revamp educational provision in the Gaidhealtachd, the Gaelic-speaking portions of Scotland, from the beginning of the Scottish Revolution in 1638 to the Cromwellian conquest of Scotland in 1651. Scholars have explored in detail the range of educational schemes pursued by central governments in the seventeenth century to “civilize” the Gaidhealtachd, but few have engaged in an analysis of Covenanting schemes and how they differed from previous endeavors. While the Statutes of Iona are probably the best-known initiative to civilize the Gaidhealtachd and extirpate the Gaelic language, Covenanter schemes both adapted such policies and further innovated in order to serve the needs of a nascent confessional state. In particular, Covenanting schemes represented a unique and pragmatic way to address the Gaidhealtachd's educational deficiencies because they sought practical accommodation of the Gaelic language and preferred the matriculation of Gaelophone scholars into the universities. These measures not only represented a new strategy for integrating the Gaelic periphery into the Scottish state but were also notable for the ways in which they incorporated Gaelophone students into Scotland's higher education orbit—a stark departure from the educational situation in Ireland. By drawing on underutilized manuscript and printed sources, this article examines how the Covenanters refurbished education in the Gaidhealtachd and posits that the Covenanter schemes represented a key facet of the broader process of state formation in 1640s Scotland.

The criminal trials of twenty-seven women processed for the crimes of abortion and infanticide in the state of Puebla, Mexico during the nineteenth century reveal both community and state perspectives about contemporary notions of gender, motherhood, and honor. This paper argues that while there was an increase in both denunciations and convictions for these crimes in the nineteenth century, women's peers acted as reluctant participants in their incrimination. Both local and higher court justices convicted women more frequently for abortion and infanticide than they had done in the colonial era, but nonetheless sentenced them with considerable leniency. Some of the explanation for their leniency lay in court officials' view that indigenous women, who constituted a considerable percentage of the defendants, were too “rustic” or “ignorant” to be held responsible for their actions. The cases also reveal, however, that courts and communities shared the view that any means–including committing violent crimes or hiding pregnancies–justified the ends of protecting plebeian women's reputation of sexual honor.