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Evoking Maxwell's demon 1
Evoking Maxwell's demon.
The following can be read as a continuation of 'Otters and Oak Trees' written in 2001. Thisdescribed an encounter with an otter which took place on the edge of the National Trust for Scotland's Threave Estate. About a mile upstream of Lamb Island is another, larger island uponwhich is a castle. It was built for Archibald the Grim sometime after 1369 and is called ThreaveCastle. In 1872, a Liverpool merchant called William Gordon bought what was then called KeltonEstate. To replace the old farmhouse of Kelton Mains, Gordon built a mock-baronial houseoverlooking the castle and named it Threave House. In 1764/5, a military road from Gretna toPortpatrick was built. It was replaced by a turnpike road in 1799/1800, but a section of the OldMilitary Road sill survives between Kelton Mains and Threave House.According to local folklore, somewhere in a dry-stane dyke (wall) on the Old Military Road near Threave House is a stone with the date '1724' carved on it. This commemorates an encounter  between the Galloway Levellers and the laird of Kelton. In the summer of 1724, the Levellers were busy levelling all the newly built dykes they could find, but after the laird of Kelton explained thatthis dyke was just the boundary of the highway and that none of his tenants would be evicted (and a bribe of bread and beer), the dyke was left standing. It is a good story and so, after I had persuadedthe makers of a BBC Scotland radio series on the Lowland Clearances to include the GallowayLevellers, it was dramatised for one of the episodes in 2003. One of the producers even found thevery stone while recording an interview with me on the Old Military Road... but on closer inspection although it was a stone with a date on it, the numbers were 175? not 1724.The radio series was then written up as a book with a chapter on the Galloway Levellers. Unlikethe Highland Clearances, the Lowland Clearances are not well known, even in Scotland. Followingon from the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie's Jacobites at Culloden, and associated with thesuppression of Scotland's Gaelic culture, the Highland Clearances have become part of Scotland's popular history. They also get a mention in volume one of Karl Marx's
Capital,
as a then recentexample of the 'Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land' (in Part 8, chapter 27).Marx's argument was that so long as poor peasants had at least some access to land, they wouldrather eke out a living in the countryside than move to cities where they had to work for others to buy food rather than grow their own. The enclosure of common land in England was part of this process, as were the Highland Clearances.
 
Evoking Maxwell's demon 2Unfortunately this process doesn't work with the Highland Clearances. The main wave of clearancestook place in the early nineteenth century, by which time the industrial revolution in Scotland andEngland was already well under way. With the Lowland Clearances, their late eighteenth centurytiming fits better, but the Galloway Levellers uprising in 1724 was too early. What their actions didhelp inspire, via the Honourable Society of Improvers of Knowledge in Agriculture in Scotland wasthe setting up of an early economic development agency -the Board of Trustees for theImprovement of Manufacturing – in 1727. Its aim was to improve the Scottish economy which hadstill not greatly benefited from the Union of 1707 – a fact exploited by the Scottish Jacobites. Thefear was that Scotland's impoverished masses might rise up in support of the Jacobites. The Boardof Trustees did not make any dramatic improvements, but the idea of 'social improvement througheconomic development' it embodied became absorbed into the Scottish Englightenment.In rough outline, the theory was that Scotland was poorer than England because it was closer to the barbarous past, it was stuck at an earlier stage of development. This failure was rubbed in by theJacobite rebellion of 1745/6, when even the best educated and civil of Scots found themselveslumped in with barbarous Highlanders by the English. The shock of the Jacobite rebellion helpeddrive the Scottish Enlightenment forward as Scotland's ruling elite desperately tried to prove thatthey were as civilised as their English peers. The great wave of 'improvement' which followed wasnot confined to the Scottish universities, it was also built into the environment – in Edinburgh'srationally planned New Town and across the estates of Scottish landowners. The LowlandClearances were part of this transformation and, at least in some cases, the enlightened estateowners also started new industrial developments including linen, woollen and cotton mills as wellas lime kilns and iron works. From the 1760s onwards, the Union with England was also beginningto pay off as Scots merchants, traders, doctors, soldiers and sailors began to profit from thecolonisation of North America and the conquest of India. For the lucky few, huge profits could bemade through crude exploitation – but through the purchase of land and then improving their newestates, the impression of civilised gentility could be created. The intellectual ferment of the Scottish Enlightenment is represented in the works of David Humeand Adam Smith. The same ferment led an instrument maker who worked for the University of Glasgow to try and improve a model steam engine he had been given to repair. This was James Wattand the improvements he made to the efficiency of steam engines stimulated Britain's industrialrevolution. Crucially, Watt's practical engineering skills were combined with an interest in what was
 
Evoking Maxwell's demon 3to become the science of thermodynamics.ComplicationsBefore proceeding further, I need to go back to my Galloway Levellers research. What I found wasthat the Galloway Levellers were not peasants resisting agricultural improvement. They had no problem with the idea of improvement or with enclosures. Their actions were directed against a fewlandowners who were illegally importing Irish cattle and one in particular who was also a Jacobitesupporter. Then, a generation later, when the process of agricultural improvement began in earnest,efforts were made to find employment for the cottars and crofters no longer needed to work theland. In one case, a whole new industrial town complete with water powered cotton mills was built.To begin with the cotton mills were a success, employing 500 workers, but by 1840 they could nolonger compete with the steam powered mills of Manchester and were closed.I then found that the two largest cotton mills in Manchester were owned by John Kennedy andJames McConnell and Adam and George Murray – who were farmers; sons from Galloway. Theyhad all moved south to become apprentices in the 1780s, working for another Galloway farmer'sson who was a textile machine maker at Chowbent near Manchester. After serving their apprenticeships, they started up as machine makers in the 1790s in Manchester before becomingcotton spinners themselves. By 1815 McConnell and Kennedy and A and G Murray each employedover 100 workers and had the two largest cotton spinning businesses in Manchester. John Kennedythen went on to join the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Committee and act as a judge at theRainhill Trials in 1829. Both firms specialised in producing high quality cotton thread. Higher quality thread required faster spinning machines and the firms led the way in gearing up Watt'ssteam engine to achieve this. Boulton and Watt's Manchester representative at this time was Peter Ewart – who also came from Galloway. His brother William Ewart had moved to Liverpool wherehis business partner was John Gladstone, father of the Victorian politician William Ewart Gladstone,William Ewart was his godfather. Altogether, over a dozen of these economic migrants fromGalloway became leading merchants and manufactures in Liverpool and Manchester as theindustrial revolution got underway. To this group can be added John Ramsay McCulloch who became a leading political economist and statistician and Thomas Carlyle, an influential literaryfigure and critic of what he termed 'the mechanical age' (in 1829). [South west Scotland also produced the civil engineers Thomas Telford and John Loudon McAdam.]And yet south west Scotland itself did not make the transition from the age of enlightenment to the
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