Adam Smith, who has towered over economics for more than two hundred years, was not alone in Scotland in creating systems of analysis which would explain how economies function and prosper. Writers of various backgrounds – there being no such profession as 'economist' – who were inspired by issues of the day as well as by the writings of Smith and other Scots, made significant contributions to the development of economic theory and policy that are often overlooked today. In the Shadow of Adam Smith, a landmark work in the history of economic thought, surveys and integrates the ideas of eighty Scottish writers from the 18th and 19th centuries to reveal a startlingly rich tapestry of argument and debate on a wide variety of economic subjects, both philosophical and practical, that remain highly pertinent today. Government debt, economic growth, banking, credit, taxation – all were tackled by this remarkable, diverse collection of writers. Through reading their contributions to economics we both understand modern economic issues and thought more deeply, and gain a richer understanding of Adam Smith's thought and inheritance. Written in a crisp and readable style with a minimum of technical detail, this is an ideal book for students of the history of economics, as well as academics and general readers.

Although "romantic science" may sound like a paradox, much of the romance surrounding modern science—the mad scientist, the intuitive genius, the utopian transformation of nature—originated in the Romantic period. Romantic Science traces the literary and cultural politics surrounding the formation of the modern scientific disciplines emerging from eighteenth-century natural history. Revealing how scientific concerns were literary concerns in the Romantic period, the contributors uncover the vital role that new discoveries in earth, plant, and animal sciences played in the period's literary culture. As Thomas Pennant put it in 1772, "Natural History is, at present, the favourite science over all Europe, and the progress which has been made in it will distinguish and characterise the eighteenth century in the annals of literature." As they examine the social and literary ramifications of a particular branch or object of natural history, the contributors to this volume historicize our present intellectual landscape by reimagining and redrawing the disciplinary boundaries between literature and science. Contributors include Alan Bewell, Rachel Crawford, Noah Heringman, Theresa M. Kelley, Amy Mae King, Lydia H. Liu, Anne K. Mellor, Stuart Peterfreund, and Catherine E. Ross.

When Columbus arrived in the Americas there were, it is believed, as many as 2,000 distinct, mutually unintelligible tongues spoken in the western hemisphere, encompassing the entire area from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego. This astonishing fact has generally escaped the attention of historians, in part because many of these indigenous languages have since become extinct. And yet the burden of overcoming America's language barriers was perhaps the one problem faced by all peoples of the New World in the early modern era: African slaves and Native Americans in the Lower Mississippi Valley; Jesuit missionaries and Huron-speaking peoples in New France; Spanish conquistadors and the Aztec rulers. All of these groups confronted America's complex linguistic environment, and all of them had to devise ways of transcending that environment - a problem that arose often with life or death implications. For the first time, historians, anthropologists, literature specialists, and linguists have come together to reflect, in the fifteen original essays presented in this volume, on the various modes of contact and communication that took place between the Europeans and the "Natives." A particularly important aspect of this fascinating collection is the way it demonstrates the interactive nature of the encounter and how Native peoples found ways to shape and adapt imported systems of spoken and written communication to their own spiritual and material needs.