Encyclopædia Britannica

Encyclopædia Britannica
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Encyclopædia Britannica

The Encyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopaedia published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., a privately held company. The articles in the Britannica are aimed at educated adult readers, and written by a staff of about 100 full-time editors and over 4,000 expert contributors. It is widely perceived as the most scholarly of encyclopaedias.[1][2]
The Britannica is the oldest English-language encyclopaedia still in print.[3] It was first published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh, Scotland and quickly grew in popularity and size, with its third edition in 1801 reaching over 21 volumes.[4][5] Its rising stature helped in recruiting eminent contributors, and the 9th edition (1875–1889) and the 11th edition (1911) are regarded as landmark encyclopaedias for scholarship and literary style.[4] Beginning with the 11th edition, the Britannica gradually shortened and simplified its articles in order to broaden its North American market.[4] In 1933, the Britannica became the first encyclopaedia to adopt a "continuous revision" policy, in which the encyclopaedia is continually reprinted and every article is updated on a regular schedule.[5]
The current 15th edition has a unique three-part structure: a 12-volume Micropædia of short articles (generally having fewer than 750 words), a 17-volume Macropædia of long articles (having from two to 310 pages) and a single Propædia volume intended to give a hierarchical outline of human knowledge. The Micropædia is meant for quick fact-checking and as a guide to the Macropædia; readers are advised to study the Propædia outline to understand a subject's context and to find other, more detailed articles.[6] The size of the Britannica has remained roughly constant over the past 70 years, with about 40 million words on half a million topics.[7] Although publication has been based in the United States since 1901, the Britannica has maintained its traditional British spelling.[1]
Over the course of its history, the Britannica has had difficulty remaining profitable—a problem faced by many encyclopaedias.[3] Some articles in certain earlier editions of the Britannica have been criticised for inaccuracy, bias or unqualified contributors.[4][8] The accuracy in parts of the present edition have likewise been questioned,[1][9] although such criticisms have been challenged by the Britannica's management.[10] Despite these criticisms, the Britannica retains its reputation as a reliable research tool.

History
Ownership of the Britannica has changed many times, with past owners including the Scottish publisher A & C Black, Horace Everett Hooper, Sears Roebuck and William Benton. The present owner of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. is Jacqui Safra, a Swiss billionaire and actor. Recent advances in information technology and the rise of electronic encyclopedias such as Microsoft Encarta and Wikipedia have reduced the demand for print encyclopedias.[11] To remain competitive, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. has stressed the good reputation of the Britannica, reduced its price and production costs, and developed electronic versions on CD-ROM, DVD and the World Wide Web. Since the early 1930s, the company has also promoted spin-off reference works.[5]

Editions
The Britannica has been issued in 15 official editions, with multi-volume supplements to the 3rd and 5th editions (see the Table below). Strictly speaking, the 10th edition was only a supplement to the 9th edition, just as the 12th and 13th editions were supplements to the 11th edition. The 15th edition underwent a massive re-organisation in 1985, but the updated, current version is still known as the 15th edition.
Throughout its history, the Britannica has had two aims: to be an excellent reference book and to provide educational material for those who wish to study.[3] In 1974, the 15th edition adopted a third goal: to systematise all of human knowledge.[6] The history of the Britannica can be divided into five main eras, punctuated by major changes in management or re-organisation of the encyclopaedia.

First era
In the first era (1st–6th editions, 1768–1826), the Britannica was managed by its original founders, Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell, and by their friends and relations, such as Thomas Bonar, George Gleig and Archibald Constable. The Britannica was first published between 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh as the Encyclopædia Britannica, or, A dictionary of arts and sciences, compiled upon a new plan. It was conceived as a conservative reaction to the provocative French Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot (published 1751–1766), which in turn had been inspired by the earlier Chambers Cyclopaedia. The Britannica was primarily a Scottish enterprise, as symbolised by its thistle logo, the floral emblem of Scotland. The founding of the encyclopaedia is one of the most famous and enduring legacies of the Scottish Enlightenment.[12] In this era, the Britannica moved from being a three-volume set (1st edition) compiled by one young editor—William Smellie—[13]to a 20-volume set written by numerous authorities. Although several other encyclopaedias competed with the Britannica, such as Rees's Cyclopaedia and Coleridge's Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, these competitors either went bankrupt or were left unfinished due to disagreements among their editors. By the close of this era, the Britannica had developed a network of illustrious contributors, primarily through personal friendships with the editors, most notably Constable and Gleig.
The middle 19th century editions of Encyclopædia Britannica included seminal research such as Thomas Young's article on Egypt, which included the translation of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone (pictured).
The middle 19th century editions of Encyclopædia Britannica included seminal research such as Thomas Young's article on Egypt, which included the translation of the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone (pictured).

Second era
During the second era (7th–9th editions, 1827–1901), the Britannica was managed by the Edinburgh publishing firm, A & C Black. Although some contributors were again recruited through personal friendships of the chief editors, most notably Macvey Napier, others were attracted by the Britannica's ever-improving reputation. The contributors often came from other countries and included some of the world's most respected authorities in their fields. A general index of all articles was included for the first time in the 7th edition, a practice that was maintained until 1974. The first English-born editor-in-chief was Thomas Spencer Baynes, who oversaw the production of the famous 9th edition; dubbed the "Scholar's Edition", the 9th is often considered to be the most scholarly Britannica ever produced.[1][4] However, by the close of the 19th century, the 9th edition was outdated and the Britannica faced significant financial difficulties.

Third era
In the third era (10th–14th editions, 1901–1973), the Britannica was managed by American businessmen, who introduced aggressive marketing practices, such as direct marketing and door-to-door sales, to increase profits. The American owners also gradually simplified the Britannica's articles, making them less scholarly but more intelligible to a mass market. The 10th edition was a rapidly produced supplement to the 9th edition, but the 11th edition is still praised for its excellence; its owner, Horace Hooper, lavished enormous effort on its perfection.[4] When Hooper fell into financial difficulties, the Britannica was managed by Sears Roebuck for roughly 18 years (1920–1923, 1928–1943). In 1932, the vice-president of Sears, Elkan Harrison Powell, assumed the presidency of the Britannica; in 1936, he began the policy of continuous revision (still practiced today), in which every article is checked and possibly revised at least twice a decade. This was a major departure from earlier practice, in which the articles were not changed until a new edition was produced, at roughly 25-year intervals, with some articles being carried over unchanged from earlier editions.[5] Powell aggressively developed new educational products that built upon the Britannica's reputation. In 1943, ownership passed from Sears Roebuck to William Benton, who managed the Britannica until his death in 1973. Benton also set up the Benton Foundation, which managed the Britannica until 1996. In 1968, near the end of this era, the Britannica celebrated its bicentennial.
U.S. advertisement for the 11th edition from the May 1913 issue of National Geographic Magazine
U.S. advertisement for the 11th edition from the May 1913 issue of National Geographic Magazine

Fourth era
In the fourth era (15th edition, 1974–1994), the Britannica introduced its 15th edition, which was re-organised into three parts: the Micropædia, the Macropædia and the Propædia. Under the influence of Mortimer J. Adler (member of the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica since its inception in 1949, and its chair from 1974; director of editorial planning for the fifteenth edition of Britannica from 1965),[14] the Britannica sought not only to be a good reference work and educational tool, but also to systematise all of human knowledge. The absence of a separate index and the grouping of articles into two parallel encyclopaedias (the Micro- and Macropædia) provoked a "firestorm of criticism" of the initial 15th edition.[1][15] In response, the 15th edition was completely re-organised and indexed for a re-release in 1985. This second version of the 15th edition continues to be published and revised; the latest version is the 2007 print version. The official title of the 15th edition is the New Encyclopædia Britannica, although it has also been promoted as Britannica 3.[1]

Fifth era
In the fifth era (1994–present), digital versions of the Britannica have been developed and released on optical media and online. In 1996, the Britannica was bought from the Benton Foundation by Jacqui Safra at well below its estimated value, owing to the company's financial difficulties. The Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. company split in 1999. One part retained the company name and developed the print version, and the other part, Britannica.com Inc., developed the digital versions. Since 2001, these two companies shared a single CEO, originally Ilan Yeshua, who has continued Powell's strategy of growing Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. by introducing new products branded with the Britannica name.

Dedications
The Britannica was dedicated to the reigning British monarch from 1788 to 1901 and then, upon its sale to an American partnership, to both the British monarch and the President of the United States.[1] Thus, the 11th edition is "dedicated by Permission to His Majesty George the Fifth, King of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Emperor of India, and to William Howard Taft, President of the United States of America."[16] The order of the two dedications has changed with the relative power of the United States and Britain, and with the relative sales of the Britannica in these countries; the 1954 version of the 14th edition is "Dedicated by Permission to the Heads of the Two English-Speaking Peoples, Dwight David Eisenhower, President of the United States of America, and Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second."[17] Consistent with this tradition, the 2007 version of the current 15th edition is "dedicated by permission to the current President of the United States of America, George W. Bush, and Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II."[18]

Critical and popular assessments
Reputation
Since the 3rd edition, the Britannica has enjoyed a popular and critical reputation for general excellence.[1][2][19] Various editions from the 3rd to the 9th were pirated for sale in the United States,[4] beginning with Dobson's Encyclopædia.[20] On the release of the 14th edition, Time magazine dubbed the Britannica the "Patriarch of the Library".[21] In a related advertisement, naturalist William Beebe was quoted as saying that the Britannica was "beyond comparison because there is no competitor."[22] References to the Britannica can be found throughout English literature, most notably in one of Arthur Conan Doyle's favourite Sherlock Holmes stories, "The Red-Headed League". The tale was highlighted by the Lord Mayor of London, Gilbert Inglefield, at the bicentennial of the Britannica.[23]
The Britannica has a popular reputation for summarising all of human knowledge.[24] To further their education, many have devoted themselves to reading the entire Britannica, taking anywhere from three to 22 years to do so.[4] When Fat'h Ali became the Shah of Persia in 1797, he was given a complete set of the Britannica's 3rd edition, which he read completely; after this feat, he extended his royal title to include "Most Formidable Lord and Master of the Encyclopædia Britannica."[23] Writer George Bernard Shaw claimed to have read the complete 9th edition—except for the science articles[4]—and Richard Evelyn Byrd took the Britannica as reading material for his five-month stay at the South Pole in 1934, while Philip Beaver read it during a sailing expedition. More recently, A.J. Jacobs, an editor at Esquire magazine, read the entire 2002 version of the 15th edition, describing his experiences in the well-received 2004 book, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. Only two people are known to have read two independent editions: the author C. S. Forester[4] and Amos Urban Shirk, an American businessman, who read the 11th and 14th editions, devoting roughly three hours per night for four and a half years to read the 11th.[25] Several editors-in-chief of the Britannica are likely to have read their editions completely, such as William Smellie (1st edition), William Robertson Smith (9th edition), and Walter Yust (14th edition).

Awards
The Britannica continues to win awards. The online Britannica won the 2005 Codie award for "Best Online Consumer Information Service";[26] the Codie awards are granted yearly by the Software and Information Industry Association to recognise the best products among categories of software. In 2006, the Britannica was again a finalist.[27] Similarly, the CD/DVD-ROM version of the Britannica received the 2004 Distinguished Achievement Award from the Association of Educational Publishers,[28] and Codie awards in 2000, 2001 and 2002.[29][30]


Coverage of topics
As a general encyclopaedia, the Britannica seeks to describe as wide a range of topics as possible. The topics are chosen in part by reference to the Propædia "Outline of Knowledge".[6] The bulk of the Britannica is devoted to geography (26% of the Macropædia), biography (14%), biology and medicine (11%), literature (7%), physics and astronomy (6%), religion (5%), art (4%), Western philosophy (4%), and law (3%).[1] A complementary study of the Micropædia found that geography accounted for 25% of articles, science 18%, social sciences 17%, biography 17%, and all other humanities 25%.[2] Writing in 1992, one reviewer judged that the "range, depth, and catholicity of coverage [of the Britannica] are unsurpassed by any other general encyclopedia."[31]
The Britannica does not cover similar topics in equivalent detail; for example, the whole of Buddhism and most other religions is covered in a single Macropædia article, whereas 14 articles are devoted to Christianity, comprising nearly half of all religion articles.[32] However, the Britannica has been lauded as the least biased of general encyclopedias marketed to Western readers[1] and praised for its biographies of important women of all eras.[2]
" It can be stated without fear of contradiction that the 15th edition of the Britannica accords non-Western cultural, social, and scientific developments more notice than any general English-language encyclopedia currently on the market. "
—Kenneth Kister, in Kister's Best Encyclopedias (1994)

Criticisms
The Britannica has also received criticism, especially as its editions become outdated. It is expensive to produce a completely new edition of the Britannica,[33] and its editors generally delay this for as long as fiscally sensible (usually about 25 years).[5] For example, despite the policy of continuous revision, the 14th edition had become significantly outdated after 35 years (1929–1964). When American physicist Harvey Einbinder detailed its failings in his 1964 book, The Myth of the Britannica,[34] the encyclopedia was provoked to produce the 15th edition, which required 10 years of work.[1] It is still difficult to keep the Britannica current; one recent critic writes, "it is not difficult to find articles that are out-of-date or in need of revision," noting that the longer Macropædia articles are more likely to be outdated than the shorter Micropædia articles.[1] Information in the Micropædia is sometimes inconsistent with the corresponding Macropædia article(s), mainly because of the failure to update one or the other.[2][19] The bibliographies of the Macropædia articles have been criticised for being more out-of-date than the articles themselves.[1][2][19]
Historically, the Britannica's authors have included eminent authorities, such as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Leon Trotsky. However, some of its contributors have been criticised for their lack of expertise:[8]
" With a temerity almost appalling, [the Britannica contributor, Mr. Philips] ranges over nearly the whole field of European history, political, social, ecclesiastical… The grievance is that [this work] lacks authority. This, too—this reliance on editorial energy instead of on ripe special learning—may, alas, be also counted an "Americanizing": for certainly nothing has so cheapened the scholarship of our American encyclopaedias. "
—Prof. George L. Burr, in the American Historical Review (1911)


Bias
Various authorities ranging from Virginia Woolf to academic professors criticised the 11th edition Britannica for having bourgeois and old-fashioned opinions on art, literature and social sciences.[24] For example, it was faulted for neglecting the work of Sigmund Freud. A contemporary Cornell professor, Edward B. Titchener, wrote in 1912, "the new Britannica does not reproduce the psychological atmosphere of its day and generation… Despite the halo of authority, and despite the scrutiny of the staff, the great bulk of the secondary articles in general psychology … are not adapted to the requirements of the intelligent reader."[35]

Editorial choices
The Britannica is occasionally criticised for its editorial choices. Given its roughly constant size, the encyclopaedia has needed to reduce or eliminate some topics to accommodate others, resulting in some controversial decisions. The initial 15th edition (1974–1985) was faulted for having drastically reduced or eliminated its coverage of children's literature, military decorations, and the French poet Joachim du Bellay; editorial mistakes were also alleged, such as an inconsistent sorting of Japanese biographies.[36] Its elimination of the index was condemned, as was the apparently arbitrary division of articles into the Micropædia and Macropædia.[1][15] Summing up, one critic called the initial 15th edition a "qualified failure…[that] cares more for juggling its format than for preserving information."[36] More recently, reviewers from the American Library Association were surprised to find that most educational articles had been eliminated from the 1992 Macropædia, along with the article on psychology.[37]
Britannica-appointed contributors are occasionally mistaken or unscientific. A notorious instance from the Britannica's early years is the rejection of Newtonian gravity by George Gleig, the chief editor of the 3rd edition (1788–1797), who wrote that gravity was caused by the classical element of fire.[4] However, the Britannica has also staunchly defended a scientific approach to emotional topics, as it did with William Robertson Smith's articles on religion in the 9th edition, particularly his article stating that the Bible was not historically accurate (1875).[4]

Racism and sexism in prior editions
By modern standards, past editions of the Britannica have contained articles marred by racism and sexism.[24] The 11th edition characterises the Ku Klux Klan as protecting the white race and restoring order to the American South after the American Civil War, citing the need to "control the negro", to "prevent any intermingling of the races" and "the frequent occurrence of the crime of rape by negro men upon white women."[38][39] Similarly, the article on Civilization argues for eugenics, stating that it is irrational to "propagate low orders of intelligence, to feed the ranks of paupers, defectives and criminals … which to-day constitute so threatening an obstacle to racial progress."[40] The 11th edition has no biography of Marie Curie, despite her winning of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911, although she is mentioned briefly under the biography of her husband Pierre Curie.[41] The Britannica employed a large female editorial staff that wrote hundreds of articles for which they were not given credit.[24]

Inaccuracy
In 1912 mathematician L. C. Karpinski criticised the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition for its many inaccuracies in the articles on the history of mathematics, none of which had been written by specialists in the field.[42] In 1917, art critic Willard Huntington Wright published a book, Misinforming a Nation,[43] that highlighted inaccuracies and English biases of the Eleventh Edition, particularly in the humanities articles. Many of Wright's criticisms were addressed in later editions of the Britannica. However, his book was denounced as a polemic by some contemporary reviewers; for example, the New York Times wrote that a "spiteful and shallow temper…pervades the book," while The New Republic opined, "it is unfortunate for Mr. Wright's remorseless purpose that he has proceeded in an unscientific spirit and given so little objective justification of his criticism."[4] Another critic, English writer and former priest Joseph McCabe, claimed that the Britannica was susceptible to editorial pressure from the Roman Catholic Church in his book, Lies And Fallacies Of The Encyclopedia Britannica (1947).[44]
The Britannica has always conceded that errors are inevitable in an encyclopaedia. Speaking of the 3rd edition (1788–1797), its chief editor George Gleig wrote that "perfection seems to be incompatible with the nature of works constructed on such a plan, and embracing such a variety of subjects." More recently (March 2006), the Britannica wrote that "we in no way mean to imply that Britannica is error-free; we have never made such a claim."[10] The sentiment is expressed by its original editor, William Smellie.
" With regard to errors in general, whether falling under the denomination of mental, typographical or accidental, we are conscious of being able to point out a greater number than any critic whatever. Men who are acquainted with the innumerable difficulties of attending the execution of a work of such an extensive nature will make proper allowances. To these we appeal, and shall rest satisfied with the judgment they pronounce. "
—William Smellie, in the Preface to the 1st edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica

Present status
15th edition of the Britannica. The initial volume with the green spine is the Propædia; the red-spined and black-spined volumes are the Micropædia and the Macropædia, respectively. The last three volumes are the 2002 Book of the Year (black spine) and the two-volume index (cyan spine).
15th edition of the Britannica. The initial volume with the green spine is the Propædia; the red-spined and black-spined volumes are the Micropædia and the Macropædia, respectively. The last three volumes are the 2002 Book of the Year (black spine) and the two-volume index (cyan spine).
Encyclopædia Britannica International Chinese Edition, translated from the original 15th edition with a few articles modified or rewritten, is published by Encyclopedia of China Publishing House; the 19th and 20th of the all 20 volumes are index.
Encyclopædia Britannica International Chinese Edition, translated from the original 15th edition with a few articles modified or rewritten, is published by Encyclopedia of China Publishing House; the 19th and 20th of the all 20 volumes are index.

2007 print version
Since 1985, the Britannica has had four parts: the Micropædia, the Macropædia, the Propædia, and a two-volume index. The Britannica's articles are found in the Micro- and Macropædia, which encompass 12 and 17 volumes, respectively, each volume having roughly one thousand pages. The 2007 Macropædia has 699 in-depth articles, ranging in length from 2 to 310 pages and having references and named contributors. In contrast, the 2007 Micropædia has roughly 65,000 articles, the vast majority (about 97%) of which contain fewer than 750 words, no references, and no named contributors.[19] The Micropædia articles are intended for quick fact-checking and to help in finding more thorough information in the Macropædia. The Macropædia articles are meant both as authoritative, well-written articles on their subjects and as storehouses of information not covered elsewhere.[1] The longest article (310 pages) is on the United States, and resulted from the merger of the articles on the individual states.
Information can be found in the Britannica by following the cross-references in the Micropædia and Macropædia; however, these are sparse, averaging one cross-reference per page.[2] Hence, readers are recommended to consult instead the alphabetical index or the Propædia, which organises the Britannica's contents by topic.[7]
The core of the Propædia is its "Outline of Knowledge," which aims to provide a logical framework for all human knowledge.[6] Accordingly, the Outline is consulted by the Britannica's editors to decide which articles should be included in the Micro- and Macropædia.[6] The Outline is also intended to be a study guide, to put subjects in their proper perspective, and to suggest a series of Britannica articles for the student wishing to learn a topic in depth.[6] However, libraries have found that it is scarcely used, and reviewers have recommended that it be dropped from the encyclopedia.[37] The Propædia also has color transparencies of human anatomy and several appendices listing the staff members, advisors, and contributors to all three parts of the Britannica.
Taken together, the Micropædia and Macropædia comprise roughly 40 million words and 24,000 images.[7] The two-volume index has 2,350 pages, listing the 228,274 topics covered in the Britannica, together with 474,675 subentries under those topics.[2] The Britannica generally prefers British spelling over American;[2] for example, it uses colour (not color), centre (not center), and encyclopaedia (not encyclopedia). However, there are exceptions to this rule, such as defense rather than defence.[45] Common alternative spellings are provided with cross-references such as "Color: see Colour."
Since 1936, the articles of the Britannica have been revised on a regular schedule, with at least 10% of them considered for revision each year.[2][5] According to one Britannica web-site, 46% of its articles were revised over the past three years;[46] however, according to another Britannica web-site, only 35% of the articles were revised.[47]
The alphabetisation of articles in the Micropædia and Macropædia follows strict rules.[48] Diacritical marks and non-English letters are ignored, while numerical entries such as "1812, War of" are alphabetised as if the number had been written out ("Eighteen-twelve, War of"). Articles with identical names are ordered first by persons, then by places, then by things. Rulers with identical names are organised first alphabetically by country and then by chronology; thus, Charles III of France precedes Charles I of England, listed in Britannica as the ruler of Great Britain and Ireland. (That is, they are alphabetised as if their titles were "Charles, France, 3" and "Charles, Great Britain and Ireland, 1".) Similarly, places that share names are organised alphabetically by country, then by ever-smaller political divisions.

Related printed material
There have been and are several abbreviated Britannica encyclopedias. The single-volume Britannica Concise Encyclopædia has 28,000 short articles condensing the larger 32-volume Britannica.[49] Compton's by Britannica, first published in 2007, incorporating the former Compton's Encyclopedia, is aimed at adolescents ages 10–17 and consists of 26 volumes and 11,000 pages.[50] A Children's Britannica was published by the company's London office in 1960; this was edited by John Armitage and dedicated to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales; contributors were almost all British, and editorial consultants were "The Headmaster, Staff and Children of the William Austin Primary School, Luton, Bedfordshire".[51] Other products include My First Britannica, aimed at children ages six to twelve, and the Britannica Discovery Library, written for children ages three to six (issued 1974 to 1991).[52] Since 1938, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. has published annually a Book of the Year covering the past year's events, which is available online back to the 1994 edition (covering the events of 1993). The company also publishes several specialized reference works, such as Shakespeare: The Essential Guide to the Life and Works of the Bard (Wiley, 2006).

Optical disc and online and mobile versions
The Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite 2006 DVD contains over 55 million words and just over 100,000 articles.[53] This includes 73,645 regular Britannica articles, with the remainder drawn from the Britannica Student Encyclopædia, the Britannica Elementary Encyclopædia and the Britannica Book of the Year (1993–2004), plus a few "classic" articles from early editions of the encyclopaedia. The package includes a range of supplementary content including maps, videos, sound clips, animations and web links. It also offers study tools and dictionary and thesaurus entries from Merriam-Webster.
Encyclopædia Britannica Online is a Web site with more than 120,000 articles and is updated regularly.[54] It has daily features, updates and links to news reports from The New York Times and the BBC. Subscriptions are available on a yearly, monthly or weekly basis.[55] Special subscription plans are offered to schools, colleges and libraries; such institutional subscribers constitute an important part of Britannica's business. Articles may be accessed online for free, but only a few opening lines of text are displayed. Beginning in early 2007, the Britannica made articles freely available if they are linked to from an external site;[56] such external links often improve an article's rankings in search engine results.
On 20 February 2007, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. announced that it was working with mobile phone search company AskMeNow to launch a mobile encyclopedia.[57] Users will be able to send a question via text message, and AskMeNow will search Britannica's 28,000-article concise encyclopedia to return an answer to the query. Daily topical features sent directly to users' mobile phones are also planned.
A radical initiative to use a wiki-based model to expand Britannica's on-line content was announced on the June 3, 2008. This is planned to involve a broad range of contributors, with editorial oversight from Britannica staff.[58] [59]

Personnel and management
Contributors
The 2007 print version of the Britannica boasts 4,411 contributors, many eminent in their fields, such as Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman, astronomer Carl Sagan, and surgeon Michael DeBakey.[60] Roughly a quarter of the contributors are deceased, some as long ago as 1947 (Alfred North Whitehead), while another quarter are retired or emeritus. Most (approximately 98%) contribute to only a single article; however, 64 contributed to three articles, 23 contributed to four articles, 10 contributed to five articles, and 8 contributed to more than five articles. An exceptionally prolific contributor is Dr. Christine Sutton of the University of Oxford, who contributed 24 articles on particle physics.

Staff
Dale Hoiberg, a sinologist, is the Britannica's Senior Vice President and editor-in-chief.[61] Among his predecessors as editors-in-chief were Hugh Chisholm (1902–1924), James Louis Garvin (1926–1932), Franklin Henry Hooper (1902–1938), Walter Yust (1938–1960), Harry Ashmore (1960–1963), Warren E. Preece (1964–1968, 1969–1975), Sir William Haley (1968–1969), Philip W. Goetz (1979–1991),[1] and Robert McHenry (1992–1997).[62] Anita Wolff and Theodore Pappas serve as the current Deputy Editor and Executive Editor, respectively.[61] Prior Executive Editors include John V. Dodge (1950–1964) and Philip W. Goetz.
The Britannica maintains an editorial staff of five Senior Editors and nine Associate Editors, supervised by Dale Hoiberg and four others. The editorial staff help in authoring the articles of the Micropædia and some sections of the Macropædia.[63]

Editorial advisors
The Britannica has an Editorial Board of Advisors, which includes 12 distinguished scholars:[64][65]
* author Nicholas Carr,
* religion scholar Wendy Doniger,
* political economist Benjamin M. Friedman,
* Council on Foreign Relations President Emeritus Leslie H. Gelb,
* computer scientist David Gelernter,
* Physics Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann,
* Carnegie Corporation of New York President Vartan Gregorian,
* philosopher Thomas Nagel,
* cognitive scientist Donald Norman,
* musicologist Don Michael Randel,
* Stewart Sutherland, Baron Sutherland of Houndwood, President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and
* cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch.
The Propædia and its Outline of Knowledge were produced by dozens of editorial advisors under the direction of Mortimer J. Adler.[66] Roughly half of these advisors have since died, including some of the Outline's chief architects: Rene Dubos (d. 1982), Loren Eiseley (d. 1977), Harold D. Lasswell (d. 1978), Mark Van Doren (d. 1972), Peter Ritchie Calder (d. 1982) and Mortimer J. Adler (d. 2001). The Propædia also lists just under 4,000 advisors who were consulted for the unsigned Micropædia articles.[67]

Corporate structure
In January 1996, the Britannica was purchased from the Benton Foundation by billionaire Swiss financier Jacqui Safra,[68] who serves as its current Chair of the Board. In 1997, Don Yannias, a long-time associate and investment advisor of Safra, became CEO of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.[69] A new company, Britannica.com Inc. was spun off in 1999 to develop the digital versions of the Britannica; Yannias assumed the role of CEO in the new company, while that of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. remained vacant for two years. Yannias' tenure at Britannica.com Inc. was marked by missteps, large lay-offs and financial losses.[70] In 2001, Yannias was replaced by Ilan Yeshua, who reunited the leadership of the two companies.[71] Yannias later returned to investment management, but remains on the Britannica's Board of Directors.
In 2003, former management consultant Jorge Aguilar-Cauz was appointed President of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Cauz is the senior executive and reports directly to the Britannica's Board of Directors. Cauz has been pursuing alliances with other companies and extending the Britannica brand to new educational and reference products, continuing the strategy pioneered by former CEO Elkan Harrison Powell in the mid-1930s.[72]
Under Safra's ownership, the company has experienced financial difficulties, and has responded by reducing the price of its products and implementing drastic cost cuts. According to a 2003 report in the New York Post, the Britannica management has eliminated employee 401(k) accounts and encouraged the use of free images. These changes have had negative impacts, as freelance contributors have waited up to six months for checks and the Britannica staff have gone years without pay rises.[73]
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. now owns registered trademarks on the words Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Macropædia, Micropædia, and Propædia, as well as on its thistle logo. It has exercised its trademark rights as recently as 2005.[74][75]

Competition
As the Britannica is a general encyclopaedia, it does not seek to compete with specialised encyclopaedias such as the Encyclopaedia of Mathematics or the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, which can devote much more space to their chosen topics. In its first years, the Britannica's main competitor was the general encyclopaedia of Ephraim Chambers and, soon thereafter, Rees's Cyclopaedia and Coleridge's Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. In the 20th century, successful competitors included Collier's Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia Americana, and the World Book Encyclopedia. Each of these encyclopaedias has qualities that make it outstanding, such as exceptionally clear writing or superb illustrations. Nevertheless, from the 9th edition onwards, the Britannica was widely considered to have the greatest authority of any general English language encyclopaedia,[24] especially because of its broad coverage and eminent authors.[1][2] However, the print version of the Britannica is significantly more expensive than its competitors.[1][2]
Since the early 1990s, the Britannica has faced new challenges from digital information sources. The Internet, facilitated by the development of search engines, has grown into a common source of information for many people, and provides easy access to reliable original sources and expert opinions, thanks in part to initiatives such as Google Books, MIT's release of its educational materials and the open PubMed Central library of the National Library of Medicine.[76][77] In general, the Internet tends to provide more current coverage than print media, due to the ease with which material on the Internet can be updated.[78] In rapidly changing fields such as science, technology, politics, culture and modern history, the Britannica has struggled to stay up-to-date, a problem first analysed systematically by its former editor Walter Yust.[17] Although the Britannica is now available both in multimedia form and over the Internet, its preeminence is being challenged by other online encyclopaedias, such as Encarta and Wikipedia.

Print encyclopedias
The Encyclopædia Britannica has been compared with other print encyclopaedias, both qualitatively and quantitatively.[1][2][19] A well-known comparison is that of Kenneth Kister, who gave a qualitative and quantitative comparison of the Britannica with two comparable encyclopaedias, Collier's Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Americana.[1] For the quantitative analysis, ten articles were selected at random (circumcision, Charles Drew, Galileo, Philip Glass, heart disease, IQ, panda bear, sexual harassment, Shroud of Turin and Uzbekistan) and letter grades (A–D, F) were awarded in four categories: coverage, accuracy, clarity, and recency. In all four categories and for all three encyclopaedias, the four average grades fell between B− and B+, chiefly because not one encyclopaedia had an article on sexual harassment in 1994. In the accuracy category, the Britannica received one D and eight As. Encyclopedia Americana received eight As, and Collier's received one D and seven As; thus, Britannica received an average score of 92% for accuracy to Americana’s 95% and Collier's’ 92%. The 1994 Britannica was faulted for publishing an inflammatory story about Charles Drew that had long been discredited. In the timeliness category, Britannica averaged an 86% to Americana’s 90% and Collier's’ 85%. After a more thorough qualitative comparison of all three encyclopedias, Kister recommended Collier's Encyclopedia as the superior encyclopaedia, primarily on the strength of its excellent writing, balanced presentation and easy navigation.

Digital encyclopedias on optical media
The most notable competitor of the Britannica among CD/DVD-ROM digital encyclopedias is Encarta,[79] a modern, multimedia encyclopedia that incorporates three print encyclopedias: Funk and Wagnalls', Collier's and the New Merit Scholar. Encarta is the top-selling multimedia encyclopaedia, based on total U.S. retail sales from January 2000 to February 2006.[80] Both occupy the same price range, with the 2007 Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate CD or DVD costing US$50[81] and the Microsoft Encarta Premium 2007 DVD costing US$45.[82] The Britannica contains 100,000 articles and Merriam-Webster's Dictionary and Thesaurus (U.S. only), and offers Primary and Secondary School editions.[81] Encarta contains 66,000 articles, a user-friendly Visual Browser, interactive maps, math, language and homework tools, a U.S. and UK dictionary, and a youth edition.[82] Like Encarta, the Britannica has been criticised for being biased towards United States audiences; the United Kingdom-related articles are updated less often, maps of the United States are more detailed than those of other countries, and it lacks a UK dictionary.[79] Like the Britannica, Encarta is available online by subscription, although some content may be accessed for free.[83]

Internet encyclopedias
Online alternatives to the Britannica include Wikipedia, a freely available Web-based free-content encyclopedia. Wikipedia receives roughly 450 times more traffic than the online version of the Britannica, based on independent page-view statistics gathered by Alexa in the first three months of 2007.[84]
A key difference between the two encyclopaedias lies in article authorship. The 699 Macropædia articles are generally written by identified contributors, and the roughly 65,000 Micropædia articles are the work of the editorial staff and identified outside consultants. Thus, a Britannica article either has known authorship or a set of possible authors (the editorial staff). With the exception of the editorial staff, most of the Britannica's contributors are experts in their field—some are Nobel laureates.[60] By contrast, the articles of Wikipedia are written by a community of editors with varying levels of expertise: most editors do not claim any particular expertise; of those who do, many are anonymous and have no verifiable credentials.[85][86] Another difference is the pace of article change: the Britannica is published in print every few years, while Wikipedia's articles are likely to change frequently. Wikipedia has been criticised in other respects as well,[87] and it has been argued[88] that Wikipedia cannot hope to rival the Britannica in accuracy.
On 14 December 2005, the scientific journal Nature reported that, within 42 randomly selected general science articles, there were 162 mistakes in Wikipedia versus 123 in Britannica.[9] In its detailed 20-page rebuttal, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. characterized Nature's study as flawed and misleading[10] and called for a "prompt" retraction. It noted that two of the articles in the study were taken from a Britannica year book, and not the encyclopedia; another two were from Compton's Encyclopedia (called the Britannica Student Encyclopedia on the company's web site). The rebuttal went on to mention that some of the articles presented to reviewers were combinations of several articles, and that other articles were merely excerpts but were penalized for factual omissions. The company also noted that several facts classified as errors by Nature were minor spelling variations, and that several of its alleged errors were matters of interpretation. Nature defended its story and declined to retract, stating that, as it was comparing Wikipedia with the web version of Britannica, it used whatever relevant material was available on Britannica's website.[89]

Edition summary
Edition/supplement Publication years Size Chief editor(s) Notes
1st 1768–1771 3 volumes, 2,670 pages, 160 plates William Smellie Largely the work of one editor, Smellie; 30 articles longer than three pages
2nd 1777–1784 10 volumes, 8,595 pages, 340 plates James Tytler 150 long articles; pagination errors; all maps under "Geography" article
3rd 1788–1797 18 volumes, 14,579 pages, 542 plates Colin Macfarquhar and George Gleig 42,000 pounds profit on 10,000 copies sold; introduction of chemical symbols
supplement to 3rd 1801 2 volumes, 1,624 pages, 50 plates George Gleig Copyright owned by Thomas Bonar, first dedication to monarch
4th 1801–1809 20 volumes, 16,033 pages, 581 plates James Millar Authors first allowed to retain copyright
5th 1817 20 volumes, 16,017 pages, 582 plates James Millar Financial losses by Millar and Andrew Bell's heirs; EB rights sold to Archibald Constable
supplement to 5th 1816–1824 6 volumes, 4,933 pages, 125 plates1 Macvey Napier Famous contributors recruited, such as Sir Humphry Davy, Sir Walter Scott, Malthus
6th 1820–1823 20 volumes Charles Maclaren Constable went bankrupt on 19 January 1826; EB rights eventually secured by Adam Black
7th 1830–1842 21 volumes, 17,101 pages, 506 plates, 187-page index Macvey Napier, assisted by James Browne, LLD Widening network of famous contributors, such as Sir David Brewster, Thomas de Quincey, Antonio Panizzi
8th 1853–1860 21 volumes, 17,957 pages, 402 plates; separate 239-page index, published 18612 Thomas Stewart Traill Many long articles were copied from the 7th edition; 344 contributors including William Thomson
9th 1875–1889 24 volumes, plus one index volume Thomas Spencer Baynes (1875–80); then W. Robertson Smith Some carry-over from 8th edition, but mostly a new work; high point of scholarship; pirated widely in the U.S.3
10th,
supplement to 9th 1902–1903 11 volumes, plus the 24 volumes of the 9th4 Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace and Hugh Chisholm in London; Arthur T. Hadley & Franklin Henry Hooper in New York City American partnership bought EB rights on 9 May 1901; high-pressure sales methods
11th 1910–1911 28 volumes, plus one index volume Hugh Chisholm in London, Franklin Henry Hooper in New York City Another high point of scholarship and writing; more articles than the 9th, but shorter and simpler; financial difficulties for owner, Horace Everett Hooper; EB rights sold to Sears Roebuck in 1920
12th,
supplement to 11th 1921–1922 3 volumes, plus the 28 volumes of the 11th5 Hugh Chisholm in London, Franklin Henry Hooper in New York City Summarized state of the world before, during, and after World War I
13th,
supplement to 11th 1926 3 volumes, plus the 28 volumes of the 11th6 James Louis Garvin in London, Franklin Henry Hooper in New York City Replaced 12th edition volumes; improved perspective of the events of 1910–1926
14th 1929–1933 24 volumes 7 James Louis Garvin in London, Franklin Henry Hooper in New York City Publication just before Great Depression was financially catastrophic
revised 14th 1933–1973 24 volumes 7 Franklin Henry Hooper until 1938; then Walter Yust, Harry Ashmore, Warren E. Preece, William Haley Began continuous revision in 1936: every article revised at least twice every decade
15th 1974–1984 30 volumes 8 Warren E. Preece, then Philip W. Goetz Introduced three-part structure; division of articles into Micropædia and Macropædia; Propædia Outline of Knowledge; separate index eliminated
1985–present 32 volumes 9 Philip W. Goetz, then Robert McHenry, currently Dale Hoiberg Restored two-volume index; merged Micropædia and Macropædia articles; slightly longer overall; new versions issued every few years
Edition notes
1Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. With preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences.
2 The 8th to 14th editions included a separate index volume.
3 The 9th edition featured articles by notables of the day, such as James Maxwell on electricity and magnetism, and William Thomson (who became Lord Kelvin) on heat.
4 The 10th edition included a maps volume and a cumulative index volume for the 9th and 10th edition volumes: the new volumes, constituting, in combination with the existing volumes of the 9th ed., the 10th ed. … and also supplying a new, distinctive, and independent library of reference dealing with recent events and developments
5 Vols. 30–32 … the New volumes constituting, in combination with the twenty-nine volumes of the eleventh edition, the twelfth edition
6 This supplement replaced the previous supplement: The three new supplementary volumes constituting, with the volumes of the latest standard edition, the thirteenth edition.
7 This edition was the first to be kept up to date by continual (usually annual) revision.
8 The 15th edition (introduced as "Britannica 3") was published in three parts: a 10-volume Micropædia (which contained short articles and served as an index), a 19-volume Macropædia, plus the Propædia (see text). It was reorganised in 1985 to have 12 and 17 volumes in the Micro- and Macropædia.
9 In 1985, the system was modified by adding a separate two-volume index; the Macropædia articles were further consolidated into fewer, larger ones (for example, the previously separate articles about the 50 U.S. states were all included into the "United States of America" article), with some medium-length articles moved to the Micropædia.
The first CD-ROM edition was issued in 1994. At that time also an online version was offered for paid subscription. In 1999 this was offered for free, and no revised print versions appeared. The experiment was ended in 2001 and a new printed set was issued in 2002.

Scotland

Scotland
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Scotland (Gaelic: Alba) is a country[7][8] that occupies the northern third of the island of Great Britain. It is part of the United Kingdom,[7] and shares a land border to the south with England. It is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the southwest. In addition to the mainland, Scotland consists of over 790 islands[9] including the Northern Isles and the Hebrides.
Edinburgh, the country's capital and second largest city, is one of Europe's largest financial centres.[10] It was the hub of the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century, which saw Scotland become one of the commercial, intellectual and industrial powerhouses of Europe. Scotland's largest city is Glasgow, which was once one of the world's leading industrial metropolises, and now lies at the centre of the Greater Glasgow conurbation which dominates the Scottish Lowlands. Scottish waters consist of a large sector[11] of the North Atlantic and the North Sea, containing the largest oil reserves in the European Union.
The Kingdom of Scotland was an independent state until 1 May 1707 when it joined in a political union with the Kingdom of England to create a united Kingdom of Great Britain.[12][13] This union was the result of the Treaty of Union agreed earlier and put into effect by the Acts of Union that were passed by the Parliaments of both countries despite widespread protest across Scotland.[14][15] Scotland's legal system continues to be separate from those of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland; Scotland still constitutes a distinct jurisdiction in public and in private law.[16] The continued independence of Scots law, the Scottish education system, and the Church of Scotland have all contributed to the continuation of Scottish culture and Scottish national identity since the Union.[17] Though Scotland is no longer a separate sovereign state, the constitutional future of Scotland continues to give rise to debate.


Etymology
Scotland is from the Latin Scoti, the term applied to Gaels. The Late Latin word Scotia (land of the Gaels) was initially used to refer to Ireland. By the 11th century at the latest, Scotia was being used to refer to (Gaelic-speaking) Scotland north of the river Forth, alongside Albania or Albany, both derived from the Gaelic Alba.[18] The use of the words Scots and Scotland to encompass all of what is now Scotland became common in the Late Middle Ages.[12]

History
The founders of Scotland of late medieval legend, Scota with Goídel Glas, voyaging from Egypt, as depicted in a 15th century manuscript of the Scotichronicon of Walter Bower.
The founders of Scotland of late medieval legend, Scota with Goídel Glas, voyaging from Egypt, as depicted in a 15th century manuscript of the Scotichronicon of Walter Bower.


Early history
Repeated glaciations, which covered the entire land-mass of modern Scotland, have destroyed any traces of human habitation that may have existed before the Mesolithic period. It is believed that the first post-glacial groups of hunter-gatherers arrived in Scotland around 12,800 years ago, as the ice sheet retreated after the last glaciation.[19][20] Groups of settlers began building the first known permanent houses on Scottish soil around 9,500 years ago, and the first villages around 6,000 years ago. The well-preserved village of Skara Brae on the Mainland of Orkney dates from this period. Neolithic habitation, burial and ritual sites are particularly common and well-preserved in the Northern Isles and Western Isles, where lack of trees led to most structures being built of local stone [21]

Roman influence
The written protohistory of Scotland began with the arrival of the Roman Empire in southern and central Great Britain, when the Romans occupied what is now England and Wales, administering it as a province called Britannia. Roman invasions and occupations of southern Scotland were a series of brief interludes. In 83–4 AD the general Gnaeus Julius Agricola defeated the Caledonians at the battle of Mons Graupius, and Roman forts were briefly set along the Gask Ridge close to the Highland line (none are known to have been constructed beyond that line). Three years after the battle the Roman armies had withdrawn to the Southern Uplands.[22] They erected Hadrian's Wall to control tribes on both sides of the wall,[23] and the Limes Britannicus became the northern border of the empire, although the army held the Antonine Wall in the Central Lowlands for two short periods—the last of these during the time of Emperor Septimius Severus from 208 until 210.[24] The extent of Roman military occupation of any significant part of Scotland was limited to a total of about 40 years, although their influence on the southern section of the country occupied by Brythonic tribes such as the Votadini and Damnonii would still have been considerable.[23]


Medieval period
Main articles: Picts, Scotland in the High Middle Ages, and Scotland in the Late Middle Ages
The Kingdom of the Picts (based in Fortriu by the 6th century) was the state which eventually became known as "Alba" or "Scotland". The development of "Pictland", according to the historical model developed by Peter Heather, was a natural response to Roman imperialism.[25] Another view places emphasis on the Battle of Dunnichen, and the reign of Bridei m. Beli (671–693), with another period of consolidation in the reign of Óengus mac Fergusa (732–761).[26] The Kingdom of the Picts as it was in the early 8th century, when Bede was writing, was largely the same as the kingdom of the Scots in the reign of Alexander (1107–1124). However, by the tenth century, the Pictish kingdom was dominated by what we can recognise as Gaelic culture, and had developed an Irish conquest myth around the ancestor of the contemporary royal dynasty, Cináed mac Ailpín (Kenneth MacAlpin).[27][3][28]
From a base of territory in eastern Scotland north of the River Forth and south of the River Oykel, the kingdom acquired control of the lands lying to the north and south. By the 12th century, the kings of Alba had added to their territories the Anglic-speaking land in the south-east and attained overlordship of Gaelic-speaking Galloway and Norse-speaking Caithness; by the end of the 13th century, the kingdom had assumed approximately its modern borders. However, processes of cultural and economic change beginning in the 12th century ensured Scotland looked very different in the later Middle Ages. The stimulus for this was the reign of King David I and the Davidian Revolution. Feudalism, government reorganisation and the first legally defined towns (called burghs) began in this period. These institutions and the immigration of French and Anglo-French knights and churchmen facilitated a process of cultural osmosis, whereby the culture and language of the low-lying and coastal parts of the kingdom's original territory in the east became, like the newly-acquired south-east, English-speaking, while the rest of the country retained the Gaelic language, apart from the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland, which remained under Norse rule until 1468.[29][30][31]
The death of Alexander III in March 1286, followed by the death of his granddaughter [[Margaret, Maid of Norway, broke the succession line of Scotland's kings. This led to the intervention of Edward I of England, who manipulated this period of confusion to have himself recognised as feudal overlord of Scotland. Edward organised a process to identify the person with the best claim to the vacant crown, which became known as the Great Cause, and this resulted in the enthronement of John Balliol as king. The Scots were resentful of Edward's meddling in their affairs and this relationship quickly broke down. War ensued and King John was deposed by his overlord, who took personal control of Scotland. Andrew Moray and William Wallace initially emerged as the principal leaders of the resistance to English rule in what became known as the Wars of Scottish Independence. The nature of the struggle changed dramatically when Robert de Brus, Earl of Carrick, became king (as Robert I). War with England continued for several decades, and a civil war between the Bruce dynasty and their long-term Comyn-Balliol rivals, the flashpoint of which could be traced to the slaying in a Dumfries church of John 'the Red' Comyn of Badenoch by Bruce and his supporters, lasted until the middle of the 14th century. Although the Bruce dynasty was successful, David II's lack of an heir allowed his nephew Robert II to come to the throne and establish the Stewart Dynasty.[32][30] The Stewarts ruled Scotland for the remainder of the Middle Ages. The country they ruled experienced greater prosperity from the end of the 14th century through the Scottish Renaissance to the Reformation. This was despite continual warfare with England, the increasing division between Highlands and Lowlands, and a large number of royal minorities.[32][33]

Modern history
In 1603, James VI King of Scots inherited the throne of the Kingdom of England, and became King James I of England, and left Edinburgh for London.[34] With the exception of a short period under the Protectorate, Scotland remained a separate state, but there was considerable conflict between the crown and the Covenanters over the form of church government. After the Glorious Revolution, the abolition of episcopacy and the overthrow of the Roman Catholic James VII by William and Mary, Scotland briefly threatened to select a different Protestant monarch from England.[35] In 1707, the Scots Parliament and the Parliament of England enacted the twin Acts of Union, which led to Scotland's formal incorporation into the Kingdom of Great Britain.[13]
The deposed Jacobite Stuart claimants had remained popular in the Highlands and north-east, particularly amongst non-Presbyterians. However, two major Jacobite risings launched in 1715 and 1745 failed to remove the House of Hanover from the British throne. The threat of the Jacobite movement to the United Kingdom and its monarchs effectively ended at the Battle of Culloden, Great Britain's last pitched battle. This defeat paved the way for large-scale removals of the indigenous populations of the Highlands and Islands, known as the Highland Clearances.[13]
The Scottish Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution made Scotland into an intellectual, commercial and industrial powerhouse.[citation needed] After World War II, Scotland experienced an industrial decline which was particularly severe.[36] Only in recent decades has the country enjoyed something of a cultural and economic renaissance. Economic factors which have contributed to this recovery include a resurgent financial services industry, electronics manufacturing, (see Silicon Glen),[37] and the North Sea oil and gas industry.[38]
Following a referendum on devolution proposals in 1997, the Scotland Act 1998 [39] was passed by the United Kingdom Parliament to establish a devolved Scottish Parliament.

Government and politics
As part of the United Kingdom, the head of state in Scotland is the monarch of the United Kingdom, currently Queen Elizabeth (since 1952).
Scotland has limited self-government within the United Kingdom as well as representation in the UK Parliament. Executive and legislative powers have been devolved to, respectively, the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood in Edinburgh. The United Kingdom Parliament retains power over a set list of areas explicitly specified in the Scotland Act 1998 as reserved matters, including, for example, levels of UK taxes, social security, defence, international relations and broadcasting.[40]
The Scottish Parliament has legislative authority for all other areas relating to Scotland, as well as limited power to vary income tax, a power it has yet to exercise. The Scottish Parliament can refer devolved matters back to Westminster by passing a Legislative Consent Motion if United Kingdom-wide legislation is considered to be more appropriate for a certain issue. The programmes of legislation enacted by the Scottish Parliament have seen a divergence in the provision of public services compared to the rest of the United Kingdom. For instance, the costs of a university education, and care services for the elderly are free at point of use in Scotland, while fees are paid in the rest of the UK. Scotland was the first country in the UK to ban smoking in enclosed public places.[41]

The Scottish Parliament is a unicameral legislature comprising 129 Members, 73 of whom represent individual constituencies and are elected on a first past the post system; 56 are elected in eight different electoral regions by the additional member system, serving for a four year period. The Queen appoints one Member of the Scottish Parliament, (MSP), on the nomination of the Parliament, to be First Minister. Other Ministers are also appointed by the Queen on the nomination of the Parliament and together with the First Minister they make up the Scottish Government, the executive arm of government.[42]
In the 2007 election, the Scottish National Party (SNP), which campaigns for Scottish independence, won the largest number of seats of any single party. The leader of the SNP, Alex Salmond, was elected as First Minister, heading a minority government, on 16 May 2007. In addition to the SNP, the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats, and the Green Party are also represented in the Parliament. Margo MacDonald is the only independent MSP sitting in Parliament.[43]
Scotland is represented in the British House of Commons by 59 MPs elected from territory-based Scottish constituencies. The Scotland Office represents the UK government in Scotland on reserved matters and represents Scottish interests within the UK government.[44] The Scotland office is led by the Secretary of State for Scotland, who sits in the Cabinet of the United Kingdom, the current incumbent being Des Browne.[40]

Administrative subdivisions
Historical subdivisions of Scotland include the mormaerdom, stewartry, earldom, burgh, parish, county and regions and districts. The names of these areas are still sometimes used as geographical descriptors.
Modern Scotland is subdivided in various ways depending on the purpose. For local government, there have been 32 council areas since 1996,[45] whose councils are unitary authorities responsible for the provision of all local government services. Community councils are informal organisations that represent specific sub-divisions of a council area.
For the Scottish Parliament, there are 73 constituencies and eight regions. For the Parliament of the United Kingdom there are 59 constituencies. The Scottish fire brigades and police forces are still based on the system of regions introduced in 1975. For healthcare and postal districts, and a number of other governmental and non-governmental organisations such as the churches, there are other long-standing methods of subdividing Scotland for the purposes of administration.
City status in the United Kingdom is determined by letters patent.[46] There are six cities in Scotland: Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow and more recently Inverness, and Stirling.[47]

Scotland within the UK
A policy of devolution had been advocated by all three GB-wide parties with varying enthusiasm during recent history and Labour leader John Smith described the revival of a Scottish parliament as the "settled will of the Scottish people".[48] The constitutional status of Scotland is nonetheless subject to ongoing debate. In 2007, the Scottish Government established a National Conversation on constitutional issues, proposing a number of options such as increasing the powers of the Scottish Parliament, federalism or a referendum on Scottish independence from the United Kingdom. In rejecting the latter option, the three main opposition parties in the Scottish Parliament have proposed a separate Constitutional Commission to investigate the distribution of powers between devolved Scottish and UK-wide bodies.[49]

Law
Scots law has a basis derived from Roman law,[50] combining features of both uncodified civil law, dating back to the Corpus Juris Civilis, and common law with medieval sources. The terms of the Treaty of Union with England in 1707 guaranteed the continued existence of a separate legal system in Scotland from that of England and Wales.[51] Prior to 1611, there were several regional law systems in Scotland, most notably Udal law in Orkney and Shetland, based on old Norse law. Various other systems derived from common Celtic or Brehon laws survived in the Highlands until the 1800s.[52]
Scots law provides for three types of courts responsible for the administration of justice: civil, criminal and heraldic. The supreme civil court is the Court of Session, although civil appeals can be taken to the House of Lords. The High Court of Justiciary is the supreme criminal court. Both courts are housed at Parliament House, in Edinburgh, which was the home of the pre-Union Parliament of Scotland. The sheriff court is the main criminal and civil court. There are 49 sheriff courts throughout the country.[53] District courts were introduced in 1975 for minor offences. The Court of the Lord Lyon regulates heraldry.
Scots law is also unique in that it allows three verdicts in criminal cases including the controversial 'not proven' verdict.[54][55]

Geography and natural history
The main land of Scotland comprises the northern third of the land mass of the island of Great Britain, which lies off the northwest coast of Continental Europe. The total area is 78,772 km² (30,414 sq mi).[56] Scotland's only land border is with England, and runs for 96 kilometres (60 mi) between the basin of the River Tweed on the east coast and the Solway Firth in the west. The Atlantic Ocean borders the west coast and the North Sea is to the east. The island of Ireland lies only 30 kilometres (20 mi) from the southwestern peninsula of Kintyre;[57] Norway is 305 kilometres (190 mi) to the east and the Faroes, 270 kilometres (168 mi) to the north.
The territorial extent of Scotland is generally that established by the 1237 Treaty of York between Scotland and England[58] and the 1266 Treaty of Perth between Scotland and Norway.[13] Important exceptions include the Isle of Man, which having been lost to England in the 14th century is now a crown dependency outside of the United Kingdom; the island groups Orkney and Shetland, which were acquired from Norway in 1472;[56] and Berwick-upon-Tweed, lost to England in 1482.
The geographical centre of Scotland lies a few miles from the village of Newtonmore in Badenoch.[59] Rising to 1,344 metres (4,406 ft) above sea level, Scotland's highest point is the summit of Ben Nevis, in Lochaber, while Scotland's longest river, the River Tay, flows for a distance of 190 km (120 miles).[60][61]

Geology and geomorphology
The whole of Scotland was covered by ice sheets during the Pleistocene ice ages and the landscape is much affected by glaciation. From a geological perspective the country has three main sub-divisions. The Highlands and Islands lie to the north and west of the Highland Boundary Fault, which runs from Arran to Stonehaven. This part of Scotland largely comprises ancient rocks from the Cambrian and Precambrian which were uplifted during the later Caledonian Orogeny. It is interspersed with igneous intrusions of a more recent age, the remnants of which have formed mountain massifs such as the Cairngorms and Skye Cuillins. A significant exception to the above are the fossil-bearing beds of Old Red Sandstones found principally along the Moray Firth coast. The Highlands are generally mountainous and the highest elevations in the British Isles are found here. Scotland has over 790 islands, divided into four main groups: Shetland, Orkney, and the Inner Hebrides and Outer Hebrides. There are numerous bodies of freshwater including Loch Lomond and Loch Ness. Some parts of the coastline consist of machair, a low lying dune pasture land.
The Central Lowlands is a rift valley mainly comprising Paleozoic formations. Many of these sediments have economic significance for it is here that the coal and iron bearing rocks that fuelled Scotland's industrial revolution are to be found. This area has also experienced intense volcanism, Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh being the remnant of a once much larger volcano. This area is relatively low-lying, although even here hills such as the Ochils and Campsie Fells are rarely far from view.
The Southern Uplands are a range of hills almost 200 kilometres (125 mi) long, interspersed with broad valleys. They lie south of a second fault line (the Southern Uplands fault) that runs from the Rhinns of Galloway to Dunbar.[62] The geological foundations largely comprise Silurian deposits laid down some 4–500 million years ago. The high point of the Southern Uplands is Merrick with an elevation of 843 m (2,766 ft).[12][63][64][65]

Climate
The climate of Scotland is temperate and oceanic, and tends to be very changeable. It is warmed by the Gulf Stream from the Atlantic, and as such has much milder winters (but cooler, wetter summers) than areas on similar latitudes, for example Copenhagen, Moscow, or the Kamchatka Peninsula on the opposite side of Eurasia. However, temperatures are generally lower than in the rest of the UK, with the coldest ever UK temperature of -27.2 °C (-16.96 °F) recorded at Braemar in the Grampian Mountains, on 11 February 1895.[66] Winter maximums average 6 °C (42.8 °F) in the lowlands, with summer maximums averaging 18 °C (64.4 °F). The highest temperature recorded was 32.9 °C (91.22 °F) at Greycrook, Scottish Borders on 9 August 2003.[67]
In general, the west of Scotland is usually warmer than the east, owing to the influence of Atlantic ocean currents and the colder surface temperatures of the North Sea. Tiree, in the Inner Hebrides, is one of the sunniest places in the country: it had 300 days of sunshine in 1975. Rainfall varies widely across Scotland. The western highlands of Scotland are the wettest place, with annual rainfall exceeding 3,000 mm (120 in).[67] In comparison, much of lowland Scotland receives less than 800 mm (31 in) annually.[67] Heavy snowfall is not common in the lowlands, but becomes more common with altitude. Braemar experiences an average of 59 snow days per year,[68] while coastal areas have an average of fewer than 10 days.[67]

Flora and fauna
Scotland's wildlife is typical of the north west of Europe, although several of the larger mammals such as the Lynx, Brown Bear, Wolf, Elk and Walrus were hunted to extinction in historic times. There are important populations of seals and internationally significant nesting grounds for a variety of seabirds such as Gannets.[69] The Golden Eagle is something of a national icon.
On the high mountain tops species including Ptarmigan, Mountain Hare and Stoat can be seen in their white colour phase during winter months.[70] Remnants of native Scots Pine forest exist[71] and within these areas the Scottish Crossbill, Britain's only endemic bird, can be found alongside Capercaillie, Wildcat, Red Squirrel and Pine Marten.[72][73]
The flora of the country is varied incorporating both deciduous and coniferous woodland and moorland and tundra species. However, large scale commercial tree planting and the management of upland moorland habitat for the grazing of sheep and commercial field sport activities impacts upon the distribution of indigenous plants and animals.[74] The Fortingall Yew may be 5,000 years old and is probably the oldest living thing in Europe.[75]

Economy and infrastructure
Scotland has a western style open mixed economy which is closely linked with that of the rest of Europe and the wider world. Traditionally, the Scottish economy has been dominated by heavy industry underpinned by the shipbuilding in Glasgow, coal mining and steel industries.
Pacific Quay on the River Clyde, an example of the regeneration of Glasgow and the diversifying Scottish economy
Pacific Quay on the River Clyde, an example of the regeneration of Glasgow and the diversifying Scottish economy
Petroleum related industries associated with the extraction of North Sea oil have also been important employers from the 1970s, especially in the north east of Scotland. De-industrialisation during the 1970s and 1980s saw a shift from a manufacturing focus towards a more services orientated economy. Edinburgh is the financial services centre of Scotland and the sixth largest financial centre in Europe in terms of funds under management, behind London, Paris, Frankfurt, Zurich and Amsterdam,[76] with many large finance firms based there, including: the Royal Bank of Scotland (the second largest bank in Europe); HBOS (owners of the Bank of Scotland); and Standard Life.
In 2005, total Scottish exports (excluding intra-UK trade) were provisionally estimated to be £17.5 billion, of which 70% (£12.2 billion) were attributable to manufacturing.[77] Scotland's primary exports include whisky, electronics and financial services. The United States, The Netherlands, Germany, France and Spain constitute the country's major export markets.[77] In 2006, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Scotland was just over £86 billion, giving a per capita GDP of £16,900.[78][79]
Tourism is widely recognised as a key contributor to the Scottish economy. A briefing published in 2002 by the Scottish Parliament Information Centre, (SPICe), for the Scottish Parliament's Enterprise and Life Long Learning Committee, stated that tourism accounted for up to 5% of GDP and 7.5% of employment.[80]
As of November 2007 the unemployment rate in Scotland stood at 4.9%—lower than the UK average and that of the majority of EU countries.[81]
The most recent government figures suggest that Scotland would be in budget surplus to the tune of more than £800m if it received its geographical share of North Sea revenues, which contrasts with a deficit in the rest of the United Kingdom.[82]

Currency
Although the Bank of England is the central bank for the UK, three Scottish clearing banks still issue their own Sterling banknotes: the Bank of Scotland; the Royal Bank of Scotland; and the Clydesdale Bank. The current value of the Scottish banknotes in circulation is £1.5 billion.[83]

Transport
Scotland has five main international airports (Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow Prestwick and Inverness) which together serve 150 international destinations with a wide variety of scheduled and chartered flights.[84] BAA operates three airports, (Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen), and Highland and Islands Airports operates 11 regional airports, (including Inverness), which serve the more remote locations of Scotland.[85] Infratil operates Glasgow Prestwick.
The Scottish motorways and major trunk roads are managed by Transport Scotland. The rest of the road network is managed by the Scottish local authorities in each of their areas.
Regular ferry services operate between the Scottish mainland and island communities. These services are mostly run by Caledonian MacBrayne, but some are operated by local councils. Other ferry routes, served by multiple companies, connect to Northern Ireland, Belgium, Norway, the Faroe Islands and also Iceland.

Scotland's rail network is managed by Transport Scotland.[86] The East Coast and West Coast Main Railway lines and the Cross Country Line connect the major cities and towns of Scotland with each other and with the rail network in England. Domestic rail services within Scotland are operated by First Scotrail.
The East Coast Main Line includes that section of the network which crosses the Firth of Forth via the Forth Bridge. Completed in 1890, this cantilever bridge has been described as "the one internationally recognised Scottish landmark".[87]
Network Rail Infrastructure Limited owns and operates the fixed infrastructure assets of the railway system in Scotland, while the Scottish Government maintains overall responsibility for rail strategy and funding in Scotland.[88]

Demography
Although on the rise again, Scotland's population has declined from its peak in the mid-1970s.
Although on the rise again, Scotland's population has declined from its peak in the mid-1970s.
The population of Scotland in the 2001 census was 5,062,011. This has risen to 5,116,900 according to June 2006 estimates.[89] This would make Scotland the 112th largest country by population if it were a sovereign state. Although Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland it is not the largest city. With a population of just over 600,000 this honour falls to Glasgow. Indeed, the Greater Glasgow conurbation, with a population of over 1.1 million, is home to over a fifth of Scotland's population.[90][91]
The Central Belt is where most of the main towns and cities are located. Glasgow is to the west whilst the other three main cities of Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee lie on the east coast. The Highlands are sparsely populated, although the city of Inverness has experienced rapid growth in recent years. In general only the more accessible and larger islands retain human populations and fewer than 90 are currently inhabited. The Southern Uplands are essentially rural in nature and dominated by agriculture and forestry.[92][93] Because of housing problems in Glasgow and Edinburgh, five new towns were created between 1947 and 1966. They are East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Livingston, Cumbernauld, and Irvine.[94]
Due to immigration since World War II, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee have small Asian communities.[95] Since the recent Enlargement of the European Union there has been an increased number of people from Central and Eastern Europe moving to Scotland, and it is estimated that between 40,000 and 50,000 Poles are now living in the country.[96] As of 2001, there are 16,310 ethnic Chinese residents in Scotland.[97] The ethnic groups within Scotland are as follows: White - 97.99%,South Asian - 1.09%, Black - 0.16%, Mixed - 0.25%, Chinese - 0.32% and Other - 0.19%.
Scotland has three officially recognised languages: English, Scots and Scottish Gaelic. Almost all Scots speak Scottish Standard English, and in 1996 the General Register Office for Scotland estimated that 30% of the population are fluent in Scots.[98] Gaelic is mostly spoken in the Western Isles, where a majority of people still speak it; however, nationally its use is confined to just 1% of the population.[99]

Education
The Scottish education system has always remained distinct from education in the rest of United Kingdom, with a characteristic emphasis on a broad education.[100] Scotland was the first country since Sparta in classical Greece to implement a system of general public education.[101] Schooling was made compulsory for the first time in Scotland with the Education Act of 1496, then, in 1561, the Church of Scotland set out a national programme for spiritual reform, including a school in every parish. Education continued to be a matter for the church rather than the state until the Education Act of 1872.[102]
All 3 and 4 year old children in Scotland are entitled to a free nursery place with "a curriculum framework for children 3–5"[103] providing the curricular guidelines. Formal primary education begins at approximately 5 years old and lasts for 7 years (P1–P7); The "5–14 guidelines" provides the curricular framework.[104] Today, children in Scotland sit Standard Grade exams at approximately 15 or 16. The school leaving age is 16, after which students may choose to remain at school and study for Access, Intermediate or Higher Grade and Advanced Higher exams. A small number of students at certain private, independent schools may follow the English system and study towards GCSEs instead of Standard Grades, and towards A and AS-Levels instead of Higher Grade and Advanced Higher exams.[105];
There are 14 Scottish universities, some of which are amongst the oldest in the world.[106][107] The country produces 1% of the world's published research with less than 0.1% of the world's population, and higher education institutions account for nine per cent of Scotland's service sector exports.[108][109]

Religion
Since the Scottish Reformation of 1560, the Church of Scotland, also known as The Kirk, has been Scotland's national church. The Church is Protestant and Reformed with a Presbyterian system of church government, and enjoys independence from the state.[12] About 12% of the population are currently members of the Church of Scotland. The Church operates a territorial parish structure, with every community in Scotland having a local congregation. Scotland also has a significant Roman Catholic population, particularly in the west. After the Reformation, Roman Catholicism continued on in the Highlands and some western islands like Uist and Barra, and was strengthened, during the 19th century by immigration from Ireland. Other Christian denominations in Scotland include the Free Church of Scotland, various other Presbyterian offshoots, and the Scottish Episcopal Church. Islam is the largest non-Christian religion (estimated at around 40,000, which is less than 0.9% of the population),[110] and there are also significant Jewish, Hindu and Sikh communities, especially in Glasgow.[110] The Samyé Ling monastery near Eskdalemuir, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2007, includes the largest Buddhist temple in western Europe.[111] In the 2001 census, 28% of the population professed 'no religion' whatsoever.

Military
Although Scotland has a long military tradition that predates the Treaty of Union with England, its armed forces now form part of the British Armed Forces, with the notable exception of the Atholl Highlanders, Europe's only legal private army. In 2006, the infantry regiments of the Scottish Division were amalgamated to form the Royal Regiment of Scotland. Other distinctively Scottish regiments in the British Army include the Scots Guards and Royal Scots Dragoon Guards.
Due to their topography and perceived remoteness, parts of Scotland have housed many sensitive defence establishments, with mixed public feelings.[112][113][114] Between 1960 and 1991, the Holy Loch was a base for the U.S. fleet of Polaris ballistic missile submarines.[115] Today, Her Majesty's Naval Base Clyde, 25 miles (40 km) west of Glasgow, is the base for the four Trident-armed Vanguard class ballistic missile submarines that comprise the UK's nuclear deterrent.
Three frontline Royal Air Force bases are also located in Scotland. These are RAF Lossiemouth, RAF Kinloss and RAF Leuchars, the last of which is the most northerly air defence fighter base in the United Kingdom.
The only open-air live depleted uranium weapons test range in the British Isles is located near Dundrennan.[116] As a result, over 7000 radioactive munitions lie on the seabed of the Solway Firth.[117]

Culture
Scottish music is a significant aspect of the nation's culture, with both traditional and modern influences. An example of a traditional Scottish instrument is the Great Highland Bagpipe, a wind instrument consisting of three drones and a melody pipe (called the chanter), which are fed continuously by a reservoir of air in a bag. The clàrsach, fiddle and accordion are also traditional Scottish instruments, the latter two heavily featured in Scottish country dance bands. Today, there are many successful Scottish bands and individual artists in varying styles.[118]
Scottish literature includes text written in English, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, French, and Latin. The poet and songwriter Robert Burns wrote in the Scots language, although much of his writing is also in English and in a "light" Scots dialect which is more accessible to a wider audience. Similarly, the writings of Sir Walter Scott and Arthur Conan Doyle were internationally successful during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.[119] J. M. Barrie introduced the movement known as the "Kailyard school" at the end of the 19th century, which brought elements of fantasy and folklore back into fashion.[120] This tradition has been viewed as a major stumbling block for Scottish literature, as it focused on an idealised, pastoral picture of Scottish culture.[120] Some modern novelists, such as Irvine Welsh (of Trainspotting fame), write in a distinctly Scottish English that reflects the harsher realities of contemporary life.[121] More recently, author J.K. Rowling has become one of the most popular authors in the world (and one of the wealthiest) through her Harry Potter series, which were originally written from a coffee-shop in Edinburgh.
The national broadcaster is BBC Scotland (BBC Alba in Gaelic), a constituent part of the British Broadcasting Corporation, the publicly-funded broadcaster of the United Kingdom. It runs two national television stations and the national radio stations, BBC Radio Scotland and BBC Radio nan Gaidheal, amongst others. The main Scottish commercial television stations are STV and Border Television. National newspapers such as the Daily Record, The Herald, and The Scotsman are all produced in Scotland.[122] Important regional dailies include The Courier in Dundee in the east, and The Press and Journal serving Aberdeen and the north.[122]

Sport
Sport is an important element in Scottish culture, with the country hosting many of its own national sporting competitions, and enjoying independent representation at many international sporting events such as the FIFA World Cup, the Cricket World Cup and the Commonwealth Games (although not the Olympic Games). Scotland has its own national governing bodies, such as the Scottish Football Association (the second oldest national football association in the world)[123] and the Scottish Rugby Union. Variations of football have been played in Scotland for centuries with the earliest reference dating back to 1424.[124] Association football is now the national sport and the Scottish Cup is the world's oldest national trophy.[125] Scottish clubs have been successful in European competitions with Celtic winning the European Cup in 1967, Rangers and Aberdeen winning the Cup Winners' Cup in 1972 and 1983 respectively, and Aberdeen also winning the European Supercup in 1983. The Fife town of St. Andrews is known internationally as the Home of Golf[126]and to many golfers the Old Course, an ancient links course dating to before 1574, is considered to be a site of pilgrimage.[127] There are many other famous golf courses in Scotland, including Carnoustie, Gleneagles, Muirfield and Royal Troon. Other distinctive features of the national sporting culture include the Highland games, curling and shinty. Scotland played host to the Commonwealth Games in 1970 and 1986, and will do so again in 2014.

National symbols
The Flag of Scotland, known as the Saltire or St. Andrew's Cross, dates (at least in legend) from the 9th century, and is thus the oldest national flag still in use. The Saltire now also forms part of the design of the Union Flag. There are numerous other symbols and symbolic artefacts, both official and unofficial, including the thistle, the nation's floral emblem, the 6 April, 1320 statement of political independence the Declaration of Arbroath, the textile pattern tartan that often signifies a particular Scottish clan, and the Lion Rampant flag.[128][129][130]
Flower of Scotland is popularly held to be the National Anthem of Scotland, and is played at events such as football or rugby matches involving the Scotland national team. Scotland the Brave is used for the Scottish team at the Commonwealth Games. However, since devolution, more serious discussion of the issue has led to the use of Flower of Scotland being disputed. Other candidates include Highland Cathedral, Scots Wha Hae and A Man's A Man for A' That.[131]
St Andrew's Day, 30 November, is the national day, although Burns' Night tends to be more widely observed. Tartan Day is a recent innovation from Canada. In 2006, the Scottish Parliament passed the St. Andrew's Day Bank Holiday (Scotland) Act 2007, designating the day to be an official bank

History of copyright law

History of copyright law
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Copyright was invented after the advent of the printing press and subsequent widening of public literacy. As a legal concept, its origins in Britain were from a reaction to printers' monopolies at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In Britain the King of England and Scotland was concerned by the unregulated copying of books and used the royal prerogative to pass the Licensing Act of 1662 which established a register of licensed books and required a copy to be deposited with the Stationers Company, essentially continuing the licensing of material for the benefit of printers that had long been in effect. The Statute of Anne in 1709 was the first real copyright act, and gave the author in the new nation of Britain rights for a fixed period, after which the copyright expired. Internationally, the Berne Convention in 1887 set out the scope of copyright protection, and is still in force to this day. Copyright has grown from a legal concept regulating copying rights in the publishing of books and maps to one with a significant effect on nearly every modern industry, covering such items as sound recordings, films, photographs, software, and architectural works.


Chronology
Prehistory of copyright
Authors, patrons, and owners of works throughout the ages have tried to direct and control how copies of such works could be used once disseminated to others. Mozart's patron, Baroness von Waldstätten, allowed his compositions created for her to be performed, while Handel's patron, George I, jealously guarded "Water Music."
Modern copyright has been influenced by an array of older legal rights that have been recognized throughout history, including the moral rights of the author who created a work, the economic rights of a benefactor who paid to have a copy made, the property rights of the individual owner of a copy, and a sovereign's right to censor and to regulate the printing industry. Prior to the invention of movable type in the West in the mid-fifteenth century, texts were copied by hand and the small number of texts generated few occasions for these rights to be tested. Even during a period of a prospering book trade, during the Roman Empire when no copyright or similar regulations existed,[1] copying by those other than professional booksellers was rare. This is because books were, typically, copied by literate slaves, who were expensive to buy and maintain. Thus, any copier would have had to pay much the same expense as a professional publisher. Roman book sellers would sometimes pay a well regarded author for first access to a text for copying, but they had no exclusive rights to a work and authors were not normally paid anything for their work.[2]
During the centuries following the destruction of the Roman Empire, European literary undertakings were confined almost entirely to the monasteries. The Roman usage, under which authors could dispose of their works to booksellers and the latter could be secure of some commercial control of the property purchased, was entirely forgotten. (In Ken Follet's novel The Pillars of the Earth, a character is astonished to meet a woman who actually owns books, which were normally owned only by churches and monasteries.)
Before legal and economic restrictions on print ownership came into being, one would occasionally find an author's or archivist's book curse inscribed in a given volume. Beyond this, however, two major developments in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries seem to have provoked the development of modern copyright. First, the expansion of mercantile trade in major European cities and the appearance of the secular university helped produce an educated bourgeois class interested in the information of the day. This helped spur the emergence of a public sphere, which was increasingly served by entrepreneurial stationers who produced copies of books on demand. Second, Gutenberg's development of movable type and the development and spread of the printing press made mass reproduction of printed works quick and much cheaper than ever before. Before printing, the process of copying a work could be nearly as labor intensive and expensive as creating the original, and was largely relegated to monastic scribes. It appears that publishers, rather than authors, were the first to seek restrictions on the copying of printed works. Given that publishers of music and films in particular commonly now obtain the copyright from a creator (although rarely a book author) as a condition of mass reproduction of a work, one of the criticisms of the current system is that it benefits publishers more than it does creators. This is one of the chief arguments in favor of peer-to-peer file sharing systems, making an analogy with the changes wrought by printing.
An interesting attempt at copyright in the early modern period was the notice attached to the ha- Shirim asher li-Shelomo , a setting of the Psalms by the composer Salomone Rossi, which happened to be the first music to be printed with a Hebrew type-face text (1623). It included a rabbinical curse on anyone who copied the contents.

Movable type
The printing press brought the possibility of compensation for literary labor. Very speedily, however, the unrestricted rivalry of printers brought into existence competing and unauthorized editions of various works, which diminished prospects of any payment, or even entailed loss, for the authors, editors, and printers of the original issue, and thus discouraged further undertaking. Any person with a press and some skills could use movable type to publish books and other items. Scribes and scriveners were no longer needed.
Protection for the authors and their representatives was sought through special privileges obtained for separate works as issued. According to Elizabeth Armstrong (whom the Curators of the Bodleian Library awarded the Gordon Duff Prize in 1965 for her essay on Printers' and authors' privileges in France and the Low Countries in the sixteenth century), "The republic of Venice granted its first privilege for a particular book in 1486. It was a special case, being the history of the city itself, the 'Rerum venetarum ab urbe condita opus' of Marcus Antonius Coccius Sabellicus".[3] "Venice began regularly granting privileges for particular books in 1492. The first, 3 January that year, went to Petrus Franciscus de Ravenna, a teacher of canon law at Padua University, who had devised a system of training the memory, which he embodied in a book entitled "Foenix". [4]
Most early Italian enactments in regard to literature were framed not so much with reference to the protection of authors as for the purpose of inducing printers (acting as publishers) to undertake certain literary enterprises which were believed to be important to the community. The Republic of Venice, the dukes of Florence, and Leo X and other Popes conceded at different times to certain printers the exclusive privilege of printing for specific terms (rarely exceeding 14 years) editions of classic authors; not so much to secure profits for the printers, but rather to encourage, for the benefit of the community, literary ventures on the part of the editors and printers.
The first copyright privilege in England bears date 1518 and was issued to Richard Pynson, King's Printer, the successor to William Caxton. The privilege gives a monopoly for the term of two years. The date is 15 years later than that of the first privilege issued in France. Early copyright privileges were called "monopolies," particularly during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, who frequently gave grants of monopolies in articles of common use, such as salt, leather, coal, soap, cards, beer, and wine. The practice was continued until the Statute of Monopolies was enacted in 1623, ending most monopolies, with certain exceptions, such as patents; after 1623, grants of Letters patent to publishers became common. The period of common-law copyright for Great Britain was brought to a close by the Act of Queen Anne in 1709. The Act had a certain effect in the British Colonies, therefore it is regarded as being the first copyright law that affected the future United States.
The earliest German privilege of which there is trustworthy record was issued in 1501 by the Aulic Council to an association entitled the Sodalitas Rhenana Celtica, for the publication of an edition of the dramas of Hroswitha of Gandersheim, which had been prepared for the press by Konrad Keltes. In 1512 an Imperial privilege was issued to the historiographer John Stadius for all that he should print, the first European privilege which was made to cover more than a single work, or undertaking to protect books not yet published. In 1794 legislation was enacted in the Prussian Parliament which was accepted by the other states of Germany (except Württemberg and Mecklenburg), under which all German authors, and foreign authors whose works were represented by publishers taking part in the book fairs in Frankfurt and Leipzig, were to be protected throughout the states of Germany against unauthorized reprints. This Berlin enactment may be credited as the first step towards a practical recognition of international copyright. Enforcement of the provisions of interstate enactments proved to be difficult, at least until after 1815.[citation needed]

Earliest copyright disputations
One of the earliest copyright disputes reputedly took place in 557 A.D. between Abbot Finnian of Moville and St. Columba over St. Columba's copying of a Psalter belonging to an Abbot. The dispute over ownership of the copy led to the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne (also know as Battle of Cooldrumman), in which 3,000 men were killed.[5] In 1557, the English monarch, Mary I, chartered a London guild of printers, bookbinders, and booksellers known as the Stationers' Company, probably in an attempt to prevent the spread of the Protestant Reformation. Only Guild members were allowed to practice the art of printing and the master and wardens of the society were empowered to search, seize, and burn all prohibited books, and to imprison any person found to be printing without a license. In return for their role in preventing the publication of books deemed heretical or seditious, the Guild's members enjoyed the economic benefits of a monopoly over the printing industry. From 1557 to 1641, the English Crown exercised authority over printing and the Stationers' Company through the Star Chamber. After the abolition of the Star Chamber in 1641, the English Parliament continued to extend the Stationers' Company's censorship/monopoly arrangement through a series of ordinances and Licensing Acts between 1643 and 1692.
During its time, the Stationers' Company developed a private system for handling disputes between its members (sometimes referred to as a Stationer's Copyright). Under this system, specific Guild members held monopoly rights in a particular work that were treated as being perpetual. Although Guild members could purchase a manuscript from an author, authors could not become members of the Guild and were not entitled to any royalties or additional payments after purchase. Members were allowed to buy and sell rights over particular works to each other. As a method to keep track of which members claimed rights in what works, the Guild required that copyrights be recorded in a registration book at the Guild's Hall. The Licensing Act of 1662 also required printers to deposit a copy of each work with the Guild to prevent changes to the work after it was reviewed by censors. Many aspects of the Stationers' system were later incorporated into modern copyright laws.
Following the English Civil War, which was partly fought over the Crown's abuse of monopolies, the Stationers' power was threatened when the last Licensing Act expired in 1694. Without their monopolies, London's booksellers faced an unregulated influx of cheap texts printed outside Britain, and in Scotland, that began flooding the English market. After years of lobbying Parliament by authors and members of the Conger, the world's first modern copyright statute was enacted – the Statute of Anne, 8 Anne, ch. 19 (1710).

The birth of modern copyright
England's Statute of Anne (1710) is widely regarded as the first copyright law. The statute's full title was "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned." This statute first accorded exclusive rights to authors (i.e., creators) rather than publishers, and it included protections for consumers of printed work ensuring that publishers could not control their use after sale. It also limited the duration of such exclusive rights to 28 years, after which all works would pass into the public domain. Although the Statute of Anne created a system of monopoly rights similar in many ways to the Stationers' Company's private system, it introduced three major changes.
Unlike previous laws that gave broad monopoly power to the Stationers' Company, who would then administer a private system of copyright between Guild members, the Statute of Anne directly outlined a public copyright system that applied to the public in general. Second, the Statute recognized a copyright as originating in the author, rather than a Guild member. Lastly, it placed a time limitation on the monopoly enjoyed by holders of a copyright. Specifically, the Act provided that an owner of the copyright in any book already printed should have the exclusive right of publishing it for twenty-one years. For works not yet published, the act provided an exclusive right to publish for fourteen years from the time of first publication, with the stipulation that the right could be extended by an author for another 14 years. However, printers argued that the texts were property owned by the authors, and therefore could be sold as such to the printers, who would then own the rights.
There were territorial loopholes in the 1710 Act. It did not extend to all British territories, but only covered England, Scotland and Wales. Many reprints of British copyright works were consequently issued both in Ireland and in North American colonies, without any license from the copyright holder required. These works were frequently issued without payment to British copyright holders, so they were cheaper than London editions. They were popular with book-buyers, but were not copyright infringements in the formal sense of the word, being within the law. The term was used, however.
In Ireland and North America there were reprint publishers who sought out formal arrangements with and made payments to British copyright holders. This illicit reprint trade was also engaged in by some Scottish publishers. These publishers were sometimes prosecuted.
Irish reprints became a matter of great concern to London publishers. Their reprints undermined direct sales to Ireland. They also crossed the border into England, and were especially sold in English provincial markets which were becoming increasingly important to London publishers. Booksellers who sold these reprints in England, Scotland, and Wales were subject to prosecution.
Between 1710-1774 there was legal debate about what length of time was meant in the 1710 act.
In the 1730s, publishers in Scotland began to reprint titles that they no longer considered to be covered by copyright. Scottish publishers printed what they perceived to be public domain English works whose copyright had expired. They sold these titles in Scotland, and in the English provinces. English publishers objected to this, on the basis of what they saw as common-law rights and property (under the concept of common-law rights in the English system), which predated the Copyright Act. Under common-law rights, rights in published works were held to continue into perpetuity.
The case of Donaldson vs Beckett, in 1774, brought disagreements on the length of copyright to an end. The outcome of the case resulted in the decision that Parliament could, and had, put a limit on copyright length. This decision reflected a shift in English ideas of copyright. The English lords who made the decision in 1774 decided that it was not in the public's best interest to have London publishers control books in perpetuity, particularly as English publishers commonly kept prices high. There were some notions that this was a cultural or class issue. Works in perpetual copyright were seen to have limited access by some citizens to the cultural history of their own land.
Concepts of the roles of the author and publisher, of copyright law, and of general Enlightenment notions, interacted in this period. Authors had been previously seen to be divinely inspired. Patronage was a legitimate way to support authors, in part because of this. Authors who were paid, rather than entering into patron-relationships, were often regarded as hacks, and looked down upon. However, the notion of individual genius was becoming more common during the 1770s (the generation after Donaldson v Beckett), and being a paid author therefore became more accepted.
In Great Britain's North American colonies, reprinting British copyright works without permission had long happened episodically, but only became a major feature of colonial life after 1760. It became more commonplace to reprint British works in the colonies (mostly in the 13 American colonies). The impetus for this shift came from Irish and Scottish master printers and booksellers who had moved to the North American colonies in the mid 18th century. They were already familiar with the practice of reprinting and selling British copyright works, and continued the practice in North America, and it became a major part of the North American printing and publishing trade. Robert Bell was an example. He was originally Scottish, and had spent almost a decade in Dublin before he moved to British North America in 1768. His operations, and those of many other colonial printers and booksellers, ensured that the practice of reprinting was well-established by the time of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. Weakened American ties to Britain coincided with the increase of reprinting outside British copyright controls.
The Irish also made a flourishing business of shipping reprints to North America in the 18th century. Ireland's ability to reprint freely ended in 1801 when Ireland's Parliament merged with Great Britain, and the Irish became subject to British copyright laws.
The printing of uncopyrighted English works for the English-language market also occurred in other European countries. The British government responded to this problem in two ways: 1) it amended its own copyright statutes in 1842, explicitly forbidding import of any foreign reprint of British copyrighted work into the UK or its colonies, and 2) it began the process of reciprocal agreements with other countries. The first reciprocal agreement was with Prussia in 1846. The US remained outside this arrangement for some decades. This was objected to by such authors as Dickens and Mark Twain.

The natural rights debate
As the first copyrights under the Statute began to expire, a legal battle erupted over what rights, if any, existed after a copyright term expired. The book publishers argued that a perpetual common law copyright existed beyond the term outlined in the Statute, akin to the situation prior to passage of the Statute. The publishers argued that copyright was a natural right. The first major victory for the book publishers came in the case of Millar v. Taylor. The case involved the poet James Thomson's book, "The Seasons." A bookseller, Andrew Millar, purchased the publishing rights to "The Seasons" in 1729. After the copyright's term expired, Robert Taylor began publishing his own competing publication, which contained Thomson's poem. The judge assigned to the case sided with the publishers, finding that common law rights were not extinguished by the Statute of Anne. Under Mansfield's ruling, the publishers had a perpetual common-law right to publish a work for which they had acquired the rights.
The decision in Millar, however, was made by an English court and so did not extend to Scotland, where a reprint industry continued to thrive and a Scottish court rejected the notion of a perpetual common-law copyright in Hinton v. Donaldson. The debate culminated in the landmark case of Donaldson v. Beckett. The decision by the House of Lords in February of 1774 rejected common-law copyright. Lord Camden, attacked the publisher's foundation for a common-law right:
The arguments attempted to be maintained on the side of the respondents, were founded on patents, privileges, Star Chamber decrees, and the bye (sic) laws of the Stationers' Company; all of them the effects of the grossest tyranny and usurpation; the very last places in which I should have dreamt of finding the least trace of the common law of this kingdom; and yet, by a variety of subtle reasoning and metaphysical refinements, have they endeavored to squeeze out the spirit of the common law from premises in which it could not possibly have existence.
Although the decision in Donaldson firmly established that, in England, works to which a copyright has expired fall to the public domain, the debate itself has resurfaced in the United States and elsewhere in the years since.

Early internationalisation
The Berne Convention of 1886 first established the recognition of a common copyright amongst several sovereign nations. (International recognition of copyright was also provided by the Universal Copyright Convention of 1952, but that convention is today largely of only historical interest.) Contrary to English tradition, copyright is granted automatically to creative works under the Berne Convention; an author does not have to actively register or otherwise apply for copyright to be applied to the work. As soon as the work is "fixed", that is, written or recorded on some physical medium (e.g. words written on page, music recorded onto tape, etc.), its author is automatically granted exclusive rights to the distribution of the work and any derivative works unless and until the author explicitly disclaims them, or until the copyright expires.
* Evolution to deal with successive waves of new technology.
* Origins of collecting societies.
* Conflicts (then resounding lack of conflict) over term extensions.

Diversion: copyright and communism
Historically, many societies governed by socialist governments have viewed copyright as a welfare or support mechanism for artists, instead of (or in addition to) a legal right. These ideas probably found their strongest expression in Scandinavian law.
The Eastern European communist states professed to employ socialist principles in rewarding their artists and authors, but the reality of their copyright systems was deeply entangled with censorship and state control of culture. Cultural workers in the Soviet Union did well if they could employ "blat" to their advantage and convince the right party officials to favour their work.
The Soviet Union did have a number of interactions with the international copyright system:
* Unsuccessful lawsuits brought by Western lawyers in an attempt to make the Soviet state recognise foreign copyrights or pay royalties to foreign authors (the USSR did occasionally pay foreign authors for the use of their works, but only if they were of a suitable ideological colour).
* Accession to the Universal Copyright Convention, with the intention of allowing the Soviet state to appropriate international copyright in works by dissident Soviet authors, and thereby control the distribution of those works outside the Communist bloc.

Modern US copyright legislation
* Enactment of the Copyright Act of 1976.
* Enactment of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
* Enactment of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
* Enactment of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act.

Recent history: globalization and technological crisis
* Digital technology introduces a new level of controversy into copyright policy.
* Inclusion of software as copyright subject matter on the recommendation of CONTU and then later with the EU Computer Programs Directive.
* Enactment of TRIPS.
* Controversy over the copyrightability of databases (Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service and contradictory cases); links to the debate over sui generis Database rights.
* Enactment of the WIPO Copyright Treaty; nations begin passing anti-circumvention laws.
* Some copyrighted works are more difficult to protect. Music, for example, may be played or sung by anyone after it has been published. But if it is performed for profit, the performers must pay a fee, called a royalty, to the copyright owner. A similar principle applies to performances of plays. As a written work, a play is protected in the same way as a book; anyone who wants to perform it must pay a royalty.

Analysis: recurring themes in the history of copyright
The history of copyright has several key themes: responses to innovations in media technologies, expansions in the definition, scope and operation of copyright, and international dissemination of the evolutions occurring in particular states.

Responses to technological innovation
The genesis of copyright can be seen as a process through which capitalist societies found a way to wed the printing press and the marketplace (see also print culture).
This commercial regulatory system, designed for the printing press, was successively expanded to include photography, phonography, film, broadcasting, photocopying (reprography) and computer programs as those technologies became widespread. These expansions were at first controversial but over time became stable components of commerce in the relevant industries.
The placement of present disputes over copyright in this historical trajectory is an interesting problem. Some commentators would add the Internet and digitised works in general to the end of the above list of technological expansions. In that view, the same functions of copyright (especially creating marketplace incentives for the production of works) remain necessary or desirable for digital material and will therefore eventually become stable and consensual. In contrast, commentators such as Barlow (1994) have argued that digital copyright is fundamentally different and will remain persistently difficult to enforce; others such as Stallman (1996) have argued that the Internet deeply undermines the economic rationale for copyright in the first place. These perspectives may lead to the consideration of alternative compensation systems in place of exclusive rights.

Expansions in scope and operation
* Move from common law and ad-hoc grants of monopoly to copyright statutes.
* Expansions in subject matter (largely related to technology).
* Expansions in duration.
* Creation of new exclusive rights (such as performers' and other neighbouring rights).
* Creation of collecting societies.
* Criminalisation of copyright infringement.
* Creation of anti-circumvention laws.
* Courts' application of secondary liability doctrines to cover file sharing networks

Regulatory leadership and internationalisation
* Early role of the UK; reciprocity and the Berne convention; the United States as a "pirate nation."
* Shift to leadership by the US during the 20th century (though some expansions continued to flow from Europe); the South and the Far East as centres of copyright breaking.
[edit] Notes
1. ^ Martial, The Epigrams, Penguin, 1978, James Mitchie
2. ^ Martial, The Epigrams, Penguin, 1978, James Mitchie
3. ^ Armstrong, Elizabeth. Before Copyright: the French book-privilege system 1498-1526. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1990, p. 3
4. ^ Armstrong, Elizabeth. Before Copyright: the French book-privilege system 1498-1526. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1990, p. 6
5. ^ Gantz, John and Rochester, Jack B. (2005), Pirates of the Digital Millennium, Upper Saddle River: Financial Times Prentice Hall, p. 30-33; ISBN 0-13-146315-2
[edit] References
1. Eaton S. Drone, A Treatise on the Law of Property in Intellectual Productions, Little, Brown, & Co. (1879).
2. Dietrich A. Loeber, ‘"Socialist" Features of Soviet Copyright Law’, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, vol. 23, pp 297--313, 1984.
3. Joseph Lowenstein, The Author's Due : Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright, University of Chicago Press, 2002
4. Christopher May, "The Venetian Moment: New Technologies, Legal Innovation and the Institutional Origins of Intellectual Property", Prometheus, 20(2), 2002.
5. Millar v. Taylor, 4 Burr. 2303, 98 Eng. Rep. 201 (K.B. 1769).
6. Lyman Ray Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective, Vanderbilt University Press, 1968.
7. Brendan Scott, "Copyright in a Frictionless World", First Monday, volume 6, number 9 (September 2001), http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_9/scott/index.html.
8. Charles Forbes René de Montalembert, The Monks of the West from St Benedict to St Bernard, William Blackwood and Sons, London, 1867, Vol III.
9. Augustine Birrell, Seven Lectures on the Law and History of Copyright in Books, Rothman Reprints Inc., 1899 (1971 reprint).
10. Drahos, P. with Braithwaite, J., Information Feudalism, The New Press, New York, 2003. ISBN 1-56584-804-7(hc.)
11. Paul Edward Geller, International Copyright Law and Practice, Matthew Bender. (2000).
12. New International Encyclopedia
13. Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc., 982 F.2d 693 (2d Cir. 1992)
14. Armstrong, Elizabeth. Before Copyright: the French book-privilege system 1498-1526. Cambridge University Press (Cambridge: 1990)
15. Gantz, John and Rochester, Jack B. (2005), Pirates of the Digital Millennium, Upper Saddle River: Financial Times Prentice Hall; ISBN 0-13-146315-2