Scottish Political Economy, Education and the Management of Poverty in Industrializing Britain: Patrick Colquhoun and the Westminster Free School Model

Abstract

This article examines how public education began to be seen as crucial to addressing the management of poverty in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Public education was central to the shaping of eighteenth-century Scottish socio-economic development and the concerns of the Scottish enlightenment intellectual project. In the generation after Adam Smith, scholars and administrators were confronted with the enormous challenges of burgeoning poverty created by urban growth and the industrial revolution, which were further exacerbated by the pressures of global warfare. Employing and adapting the methods and insights of Scottish political economy, as well as the lessons of Britain’s colonial experience, the influential author and magistrate Patrick Colquhoun advocated mass education to tackle the problems that Britain faced in the era of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.