Essential to a consideration of the structuring of social relationships is the contemporary ideological context through which people explicitly understood their world. Understanding the emergence of modern society is to understand how today's social relationships came to be historically structured as they are. This work, focused on the Southern Scottish Highlands, is particularly concerned with the growth to predominance of the social relations of capitalism, where the central place of the individual, defined in isolation from wider society, relates to individualized notions of private property and land ownership, land rights and tenancy.

This shift in importance of relationships started during the period of Improvement, a process involving fundamental change in the ways people engaged with each other. Improvement emphasized the individualized relationships of capitalism over those of community or kin, and this was in large measure achieved through the restructuring of the material, physical environment.

This essential reading will be of importance to archaeologists specializing in capitalism, historical archaeology and Scottish archaeologists and historians.