Statistical Accounts of Scotland

About: 

The two Statistical Accounts of Scotland, covering the 1790s and the 1830s, are among the best contemporary reports of life during the agricultural and industrial revolutions in Europe. Learn more about the area in which you or your ancestors have lived, or use this key source to study the emergence of the modern British State and the economic and social impact of the world's first industrial nation.

Based largely on information supplied by each parish [church] minister and other compilers, the Old (First) Statistical Account (1791-99) and the New (Second) Statistical Account (1834-1845) provide a rich record of a wide variety of topics: wealth, social structures and poverty; climate, agriculture, fishing and wildlife; religion; population, schools, and the social habits of the people.

The online service features include: 

  • scanned images for browsing
  • transcribed text enabling copy and paste
  • page and volume search
  • the accounts presented in published order
  • key word searching and display of results in order
  • bookmarking of parishes or page citations
  • PDF download for parish reports
  • selected original manuscript parish reports 
  • resources related to the preparation and publication of the Accounts
  • parish links to the Gazetteer for Scotland
  • index to compilers of parish reports
  • index of map within the Accounts
  • contemporaries and successors

Contact: 

All visitors can freely browse, view and print the scanned original pages from the two Accounts by clicking on the "Browse scanned pages" link on the Statistical Accounts of Scotland login page, and subscriptions to the Statistical Accounts of Scotland service may be taken out by individuals, educational institutions and other organisations in the UK and overseas.  http://edina.ac.uk/stat-acc-scot/access/prices.htmlLinks/APIs: There are links to Parishes or specific pages (via Persistent URLs, PURLS), from which additional metadata can be derived, but there is no public API

Terms of Service: 

The Statistical Accounts of Scotland Online Service is provided by EDINA. The design of the interface and database are property of EDINA. Copyright in page images belongs jointly to the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh.  Subscribers to the service may print or download, in full, the page images from up to 10 parishes for use in teaching, research or personal educational development. These page images may not be republished in full in any format including, inter alia, on the world-wide-web, in print or on CD-ROM. A single page image from a parish may be republished on condition that copyright is properly acknowledged (in the form 'Images from Statistical Accounts Online Service © University of Glasgow and University of Edinburgh') and a link is provided alongside to the front page of the Statistical Accounts Online Service (in the form 'The Statistical Accounts of Scotland is available online at http://edina.ac.uk/stat-acc-scot/').Use of images for consultancy or for services leading to their commercial exploitation is prohibited without the explicit permission of the Copyright holders. A request for such permission should be addressed to EDINA in the first instance: Email edina@ed.ac.uk or tel: 0131-650 3302.