Adam Smith spent almost three years (1764 to 1766) in France with the third Duke of Buccleuch (Henry Scott, 1746–1812) on their Grand Tour. Our interest in Smith’s time as a tutor has tended to focus on the influences that were brought to bear on his thinking during his travels abroad. This highly original book on their relationship moves far beyond that. It highlights Smith’s role as both tutor and adviser to the duke and shows that Smith’s ideas had an important influence on his pupil’s attempts to improve his estates. The book can be read as a case study of the ways in which the intellectual concerns of the Scottish Enlightenment and its associated culture of improvement influenced the management of a nobleman’s landed estate.

It was Charles Townshend, statesman and the duke’s stepfather, who employed Smith to finish the duke’s education by way of a Grand Tour of Europe. The author’s extensive archival research on private papers and letters reveals that Townshend saw Smith’s constitutional knowledge and his notions of government as his particular qualities and thought that the duke’s education under Smith could prepare him for the role of statesman and the duties of high office (pp. 42–43). A significant part of Smith’s lectures on moral philosophy in Glasgow had been concerned with the historical progress of jurisprudence, the way in which this related to the development of the institutions of law and government, and the practical regulations of government—what Smith would later term “political economy.” It was these subjects that would have formed an important part of Smith’s teaching during the Grand Tour (pp. 49–50).

Smith’s role, however, did not end there. With Townshend’s death and the duke’s coming of age in September 1767, Smith’s mentoring role became even more important, as he was the duke’s closest and most trusted acquaintance in Scotland (p. 64). Smith played a key role when the duke set in motion an ambitious attempt to reorganize and improve his estates (p. 58). For example, Smith acted on behalf of the duke and instructed Ilay Campbell, a son of the duke’s joint legal agent, Archibald Campbell, and a former pupil of Smith, to make a draft of a proposed Act of Parliament to alter the estate’s strict entail in such a way as to enable the duke to grant longer leases and the right to exchange pieces of land that were intermixed with the entailed estate (pp. 62–63, 69–71). Here it is suggested that this reform corresponded closely to Smith’s views on improvement, because, like many contemporary Scottish writers on improvement, Smith believed that feudal perpetuities, such as entails, were acting as a brake upon improvement (p. 68). It is argued that this proposed reform to the estate’s restrictive entail would allow the duke to issue exactly the kind of long leases that Smith had argued were an essential prerequisite for encouraging tenants to make improvements (p. 69). In fact, shortly after the passing of the Entail Act in May 1770, the reorganization and improvement of the duke’s lowland estates began in earnest (pp. 70–71, 82–83).

It is also shown that Smith helped to draft an advertisement in the Edinburgh Advertiser of 20 October 1767, which announced the general resetting of the duke’s entire Scottish estate, requesting the prospective tenants to outline both the length of the lease and the nature of the improvements intended to be made (p. 63). It is pointed out that this letting policy was also broadly consistent with Smith’s own views on the most expedient way in which agricultural improvement could be encouraged: to break up large estates into smaller, owner-occupied farms. Specifically inviting offers was an explicit attempt to expose the land to the competition of the market and attract exactly such men of scheme and project that Smith believed would make the best improvers (p. 69).

William Keir, the duke’s overseer of improvements (1772 to 1810), is another intriguing figure in the book. He wrote a “Report on the value of the sheep farms” (1791) and systematically attempted to apply Smith’s insights to the management and improvement of the duke’s estate. Keir set rents at a level that would optimize the tenants’ motivation to make improvements, and it is argued that it was a debt to a key line of Scottish Enlightenment economic enquiry: the way in which an understanding of human nature, particularly in terms of its motivations, could be used to analyze the way in which economic systems worked and make them function more effectively (pp. 129–130). It is reported that by the early 1790s, the value of the duke’s farms had greatly increased (p. 112), and Keir’s own proposed rents for the farms amounted to a rise of around 40% on the levels of rent set in 1775 (p. 113).

It is also argued, but slightly less convincingly, that the Ayr Bank crash, in which the duke was deeply involved and on which Smith almost certainly advised him (p. 78), seems to have led Smith to adopt a more conservative stance on banking in general (p. 80).

Towards the end of the book, however, the narrative seems to turn away from its main thesis and argues that, despite Keir’s broad agreement with the general principles of Smith’s economic thinking, opening up the tenancies of the estate to the market revealed for Keir a nascent tension between the principles of the free market and the management of a great landed estate. In the end, Keir rejected Smith’s idea that land should be brought into the market like any other commodity (p. 184). The ultimate aim of this idea was to encourage the breaking up of large estates, thereby opening up the land market to entrepreneurs who had made their money elsewhere and who, according to Smith, would be much better suited to the task of improving their land for profit than the great hereditary landowners (pp. 184–185).

For Keir, however, the influx of this class of men into landownership invariably led to inflated levels of rent being offered, leaving tenants unable to stock their farms properly and struggling to pay their rents, let alone find the surplus capital necessary to improve their farms. If there was no guarantee that the tenant would not be replaced by a higher bidder at the end of the lease, Keir believed, any improvements that were carried out would tend to be temporary, calculated to secure the greatest possible profit in the short term but ultimately leaving the farm in a worse state than it was in before (p. 185). This would in turn undermine the landowner’s power over tenants in respect of the management and improvement of their farms (p. 187). It is summed up that Keir’s thinking on the need to reconcile the goals of improvement with the other elements of the landowner–tenant relationship would come to influence the management strategy of the Buccleuch estates directly during the later stages of the duke’s administration, which was not to maximize the rental income in the short term, but rather to effect the long-term improvement of the estate while simultaneously maintaining the Buccleuch family’s wider moral, social, and political influence (pp. 184, 196).

In my reading through the volume, one topic that strikes me is the fact that there was a collective response to the Buccleuch estate’s clampdown on poaching to protest against what were seen as encroachments upon customary rights and traditional practices, such as the right to fish on the estates (p. 170). I have treated another example on the Earl of Morton’s estates in Orkney, where the people were willing to resist the changes associated with improvement when they affected their perceived traditional rights (Furuya Reference Furuya2011, Reference Furuya2015). It is therefore highly instructive to me to know that a kind of paternalism was employed on the Buccleuch estate as a pragmatic response to changing circumstances that attempted to reinforce the existing social and political hierarchy (pp. 150–151). This was exactly the top-down, “improvement from above” approach as practiced upon the Buccleuch estate under the third duke, one in which improvement was envisaged as a means of reinforcing the bonds between landowner and tenant, the very bonds that, according to Keir, were threatened by the intrusion of unfettered commercialization and exclusively economic goals (pp. 151, 192, 195). It is also impressive to see that, by the end of the third duke’s administration, the financial rewards of the “improvement from above” were more than evident, with the annual gross rental of his Scottish estates standing at over £50,000 (p. 196).

The author’s conclusion might be an understatement: the duke’s “improvement from above” approach seems to me to have differed more sharply from what Smith had argued than the author allows. I would see it as a third way between the Enlightenment idea of improvement on the one hand, which the Earl of Morton and his parish minister Thomas Hepburn more emphatically endorsed in Orkney than the Duke of Buccleuch dared to practice on his own estates, and reactionary, traditional attitudes towards commercialization and the free market on the other.