Academic literature on the topic 'Merchants – Scotland – Biography'

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.

Abstract Adam Smith's biographers have been in no doubt how important his experiences of living and working among Glasgow's merchant community were to the content of The Wealth of Nations. Many Smith scholars who themselves have been based in the city go further. They insist on the essential Scottishness of the text, seeing Glasgow as the indispensable intermediary between lowland Scotland's town-and-country dynamics and its insertion into global trading routes. However, Glasgow plays no explicit part in the way Smith chose to construct his arguments. I use this juxtaposition between the fundamental feeling that a work can elicit for a particular reading community and the words that actually appear on the page to ask the methodological question of how to proceed when encountering an apparent absence in a text. The reader does not possess a privileged access point from which to offer correctives by way of asserting that certain knowledge should have been present even though it is not. An absence from the text does not equate to missing text in the form of an obviously anomalous omission. Studies of the historical backdrop against which Smith was writing cannot be given the same authority when interpreting The Wealth of Nations as his direct communication to the reader of his views on the relationship between text and context. We may know more than he chose to reveal about his social and cultural embeddedness within the Glaswegian merchant community, but at most this knowledge can only provide an extra perspective when the matter at hand is textual interpretation. It is not a direct substitute for what Smith chose not to say.