[Excerpt] While much has been written in the past 20 years concerning the Old Poor Law in England, very little attention has been given to the development of the Scottish Poor Law. This is surprising, given that the Scottish Poor Law differed radically from its English counterpart in its response to the increasing poverty of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. R. A. Cage's descriptive account of the administration of the Poor Law in Scotland from 1745 to 1845 is therefore a welcome addition to the existing literature on the early development of the British social welfare system.