The silhouette of the poet Agnes McLehose serves a metaphor for a woman's legal rights in the British Atlantic world.  Women like her navigated and contested numerous laws and legal traditions that shaped their lives in significant ways. In the male-dominated eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women faced considerable legal constraints over their property as well as their bodies. Much depended on a woman's marital status and the legal regime under which she lived.

Scots engaged in commerce on local, transatlantic, and global scales by forging numerous commercial relationships at home and aboard. Personal and financial connections helped artisans and farmers to sell their wares in Edinburgh's Grassmarket, allowed fishermen from the Isle of Lewis to send their catch to London, and enriched the Glasgow merchants who controlled large swaths of the American commodities trade.

The man shown here, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, served as the last royal governor of Virginia. Dunmore’s tenure as colonial Virginia’s final chief executive highlights both the major role Scots played in administering Britain’s American empire and the close links between Virginia and Scotland. By the mid-eighteenth century, commerce bound Glaswegian merchants to Virginia planters as Scots took control of the Chesapeake tobacco trade. Scots settled in Virginia to work this trade, where they often acquired land and slaves of their own.

Christianity was a powerful force in Scottish society. Beginning in the sixteenth century the Scottish Reformation, part of the wider Protestant revolution in Europe, began to transform Scotland into a Presbyterian nation. The Church of Scotland, or the Kirk, and its adherents broke with Roman Catholicism and reformed its doctrines to reflect Calvinist theology.

The Lords of Session regularly heard disputes over real and personal property.  Scottish law divided property between heritable (real) and moveable (personal) "subjects." The law prevented the transfer of heritable property by means of a will. Real estate descended to the deceased's immediate heirs, but through a will a testor could convey moveable property to her or his executors, next of kin, or anyone else they saw fit.

Robert Gibb's 1826 painting, Craigmillar Castle from Dalkeith Road, is an idealized vision of an early nineteenth-century Scottish agricultural landscape. His work captured the centrality of farming and animal husbandry to Scotland's economy and society, even if his scene of pastoral serenity belied the era's chaotic land reforms and social dislocation.

Labor in its many forms was a fundamental part of everyday life in Scotland and the British Atlantic world. Skilled professionals and unskilled laborers performed a variety of jobs, from law clerks in the Court of Session, to Highland kelp farmers, to Lowland nursemaids. Indentured servants bound themselves out to individual masters or companies in exchange for an education in a particular trade or the chance to make their lives a little better.