WOMEN, RIOTS AND THE PRE-INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY

This piece was kindly sent to the guest editor by Dr Elizabeth Ritchie (University of the Highlands and Islands) in the summer of 2022, just after the conference held in memory of Professor Eric Richards in Inverness. Eric had sent it to Elizabeth with the generous instruction that she use it with her History students and has not been published elsewhere. It is presented here largely as it was found, a well-developed script for a lecture given at Flinders University Adelaide, which was clearly the start of a larger work in progress. Eric was re-visiting some themes and places he had first begun working on in the 1970s: rioting, protest and gender, with his main case study located in nineteenth century Sutherland, a county, society and estate he was expert in. The editor has made minimal editorial interventions, only tidying up the main text and providing more detail in the references where possible (in square brackets), while leaving the originals untouched. The value of the piece lies in the way the reader can track the dynamism and range of Eric's intellectual endeavours, particularly the way he reflected back on his earlier work and drawing on new historiography, sometimes directly talking to himself between the main text and the references. We can see his processes and methods at work here, exposed in a way normally closed off to us, sometimes (towards the end of the article) directly talking to himself. As ever, even in draft or unfinished form, Eric's work is always thought-provoking and original and we hope this is a fitting end to this special issue.