Richard G. Rodger, FRHistS, FAcSS, is a historian specialising in the urban, economic and social history of modern Britain. Previously Professor of Urban History and Director of the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester, and from 2007-2017 Professor of Economic and Social History at Edinburgh University.
Rodger completed his master of arts (MA) and doctor of philosophy (PhD) degrees in economics and economic history at Edinburgh University; his PhD was awarded in 1976 for a thesis entitled Scottish Urban Housebuilding, 1870–1914. He was appointed to a lectureship in economic history at Liverpool University (1971–79) before moving to the University of Leicester, where he was appointed as a lecturer economic and social history in 1979, subsequently becoming Professor of Urban History and Director of the Centre for Urban History and the East Midlands Oral History Archive. Rodger held a position as associate professor in the University of Kansas (1982-1986), and visiting positions at Trinity College, Hartford CT (1990), and Meijo University, Japan (2004). He also held an ESRC Senior Fellowship (1995) and a Leverhulme Senior Fellowship (1996) at Edinburgh University, where he returned in 2007 as Professor of economic and social history. He remained at Leicester University as an Honorary Visiting Professor, and in 2017 became Emeritus Professor of History at Edinburgh University. [1] [2]
In addition to his university appointments, Rodger has been the editor of the journal Urban History (from 1987 to 2007) and the series editor for Ashgate Publishing's Historical Urban Studies book series (1990 to 2010). [1] He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Academy of Social Sciences. [3] [4] and he has been a member of the council of trustees of the Edinburgh conservationist organisation the Cockburn Association since 2011. [5]
Rodger's research relates to the urban, economic and social history of modern Britain and his publications include: [6]
Sir Patrick Geddes was a Scottish biologist, sociologist, Comtean positivist, geographer, philanthropist and pioneering town planner. He is known for his innovative thinking in the fields of urban planning and sociology. His works contain one of the earliest examples of the 'think globally, act locally' concept in social science.
George C. Peden is an emeritus professor of history at Stirling University, Scotland.
Charles William John Withers, is a British historical geographer and academic. He has been the Geographer Royal for Scotland since 2015, and held the Ogilvie Chair of Geography at the University of Edinburgh from 1994 to 2019.
Urban history is a field of history that examines the historical nature of cities and towns, and the process of urbanization. The approach is often multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like social history, architectural history, urban sociology, urban geography, business history, and archaeology. Urbanization and industrialization were popular themes for 20th-century historians, often tied to an implicit model of modernization, or the transformation of rural traditional societies.
Peter Alan Clark is a British historian. Since 2000, he was professor of European urban history at the University of Helsinki. He retired in 2011.
Rosalind Mary Mitchison FRSE was a 20th-century English historian and academic who specialised in Scottish social history. She was affectionately known as "Rowy" Mitchison.
The economic history of Scotland charts economic development in the history of Scotland from earliest times, through seven centuries as an independent state and following Union with England, three centuries as a country of the United Kingdom. Before 1700 Scotland was a poor rural area, with few natural resources or advantages, remotely located on the periphery of the European world. Outward migration to England, and to North America, was heavy from 1700 well into the 20th century. After 1800 the economy took off, and industrialized rapidly, with textile, coal, iron, railroads, and most famously shipbuilding and banking. Glasgow was the centre of the Scottish economy. After the end of the First World War in 1918, Scotland went into a steady economic decline, shedding thousands of high-paying engineering jobs, and having very high rates of unemployment especially in the 1930s. Wartime demand in the Second World War temporarily reversed the decline, but conditions were difficult in the 1950s and 1960s. The discovery of North Sea oil in the 1970s brought new wealth, and a new cycle of boom and bust, even as the old industrial base had decayed.
Harold James Dyos (1921–1978) was a British historian, known for his contributions to urban history. He wrote many essays addressing the issue of urbanization.
Sir George Walter Prothero was an English historian, writer, and academic who served as president of the Royal Historical Society from 1901 to 1905.
John MacDonald MacKenzie is a British historian of imperialism who pioneered the study of popular and cultural imperialism, as well as aspects of environmental history. He has also written about Scottish migration and the development of museums around the world. He is Emeritus Professor of imperial history at Lancaster University and founder of the Manchester University Press ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series (1984).
Romanticism in Scotland was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that developed between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. It was part of the wider European Romantic movement, which was partly a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment, emphasising individual, national and emotional responses, moving beyond Renaissance and Classicist models, particularly into nostalgia for the Middle Ages. The concept of a separate national Scottish Romanticism was first articulated by the critics Ian Duncan and Murray Pittock in the Scottish Romanticism in World Literatures Conference held at UC Berkeley in 2006 and in the latter's Scottish and Irish Romanticism (2008), which argued for a national Romanticism based on the concepts of a distinct national public sphere and differentiated inflection of literary genres; the use of Scots language; the creation of a heroic national history through an Ossianic or Scottian 'taxonomy of glory' and the performance of a distinct national self in diaspora.
Katrina Honeyman was a British economic historian and Professor of Social and Economic History at the University of Leeds. Much of her work focused on the role of women and children in industrialisation in Britain.
Art in modern Scotland includes all aspects of the visual arts in the country since the beginning of the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, the art scene was dominated by the work of the members of the Glasgow School known as the Four, led by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who gained an international reputation for their combination of Celtic revival, Art and Crafts and Art Nouveau. They were followed by the Scottish Colourists and the Edinburgh School. There was a growing interest in forms of Modernism, with William Johnstone helping to develop the concept of a Scottish Renaissance. In the post-war period, major artists, including John Bellany and Alexander Moffat, pursued a strand of "Scottish realism". Moffat's influence can be seen in the work of the "new Glasgow Boys" from the late twentieth century. In the twenty-first century Scotland has continued to produce influential artists such as Douglas Gordon and Susan Philipsz.
Housing in Scotland includes all forms of built habitation in what is now Scotland, from the earliest period of human occupation to the present day. The oldest house in Scotland dates from the Mesolithic era. In the Neolithic era settled farming led to the construction of the first stone houses. There is also evidence from this period of large timber halls. In the Bronze Age there were cellular round crannogs and hillforts that enclosed large settlements. In the Iron Age cellular houses begin to be replaced on the northern isles by simple Atlantic roundhouses, substantial circular buildings with a drystone construction. The largest constructions that date from this era are the circular brochs and duns and wheelhouses.
Landscape painting in Scotland includes all forms of painting of landscapes in Scotland since its origins in the sixteenth century to the present day. The earliest examples of Scottish landscape painting are in the tradition of Scottish house decoration that arose in the sixteenth century. Often said to be the earliest surviving painted landscape created in Scotland is a depiction by the Flemish artist Alexander Keirincx undertaken for Charles I.
In Scotland, the Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes and economic expansion between the mid-eighteenth century and the late nineteenth century. By the start of the eighteenth century, a political union between Scotland and England became politically and economically attractive, promising to open up the much larger markets of England, as well as those of the growing British Empire, resulting in the Treaty of Union of 1707. There was a conscious attempt among the gentry and nobility to improve agriculture in Scotland. New crops were introduced and enclosures began to displace the run rig system and free pasture. The economic benefits of union were very slow to appear, some progress was visible, such as the sales of linen and cattle to England, the cash flows from military service, and the tobacco trade that was dominated by Glasgow after 1740. Merchants who profited from the American trade began investing in leather, textiles, iron, coal, sugar, rope, sailcloth, glass-works, breweries, and soap-works, setting the foundations for the city's emergence as a leading industrial center after 1815.
Robert John Morris, FRHistS, known professionally as R. J. Morris, was an English historian and Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Edinburgh.
Graeme Morton is a Scottish academic historian who has occupied the Chair of Modern History at the University of Dundee since 2013.
Simon Alexander Lindsay Gunn is a historian who was Professor of Urban History at the University of Leicester from 2006 to 2021.
Michael Anderson, OBE, FRSE, FBA is an economic historian and retired academic. He was Professor of Economic History at the University of Edinburgh between 1979 and 2007.