In the latter years of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th century, Glasgow was like other parts of Scotland, most notably Edinburgh and Aberdeen, in that its citizens were engaged in what he would now call politics but which back then was described as philosophical speculation.

The Scottish Enlightenment, of which Glasgow was a principal centre, led people young and old, wise and foolish, and mostly male but with a few female contributors, to discuss, question and learn about such issues as emancipation, human rights, state power, and political control of the many by the few – especially in Scotland where just a few officials such as the Lord Advocate and Solicitor General ran the country, and where burghs were notable for the corrupt practices of the gentry who ran them. Even Henry Dundas, the uncrowned King of Scotland, had to act when it became clear that corruption was everywhere, but he was more concerned about radicalism.

The anonymous words of a certain poet inspired radical thought, but then Robert Burns was also a customs officer and needed to keep his identity secret.

Much more influential was Thomas Paine’s work, Rights of Man. It contains a passage which was very Scottish: “Individuals, themselves, each, in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a contract with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.”

The Scottish people are sovereign, his supporters claimed – and they still do.   

In his excellent book ‘Scotland's radical history - from the French Revolutionary era to the 1820 Rising’ Alba Party MP Kenny MacAskill has shown how an oligarchy of landowners conspired with corrupt politicians and judges to maintain rigid control of the working classes and radical thinkers. It was a time of increasing urbanisation amid the continuing industrial revolution and changes in the population as a whole as the agrarian ‘cottar-based’ society rapidly began to die out. Glasgow was the biggest exemplar of these changes – the population of the city increased fourfold in the 18th century as new industries were created that needed working people to service them.

As we have seen, the French Revolution inspired Thomas Muir and other thinkers from Glasgow and elsewhere to think along radical, progressive lines. Muir and his fellow radicals were sentenced to transportation to Australia after show trials that were meant to intimidate working people. Glasgow being Glasgow, the persecution had quite the opposite effect.

Though it was not to erupt into the world’s consciousness until the early 20th century, Glasgow’s history of working class struggle really began back then in Muir’s time in the 1790s and developed in the first three decades of the 19th century.

To put things in context, radicalism was not just about working people banding together and learning to fight for themselves. It involved the middle classes as well, because they could see how unfair the British political system was. Education was the means to encourage people to think about everything around them.

The Glasgow Philosophical Society was founded in 1802, and is now the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow. It was founded “to aid the study, diffusion, and advancement of the arts and sciences with their applications, and the better understanding of public affairs”. Note the latter part of that sentence drawn from its foundation document.

Two years after the Society’s foundation, the Hunterian Museum was opened, and it was a huge boost to the intellectual life of Glasgow.

Just briefly to describe it: the Museum was based on the collection of Dr William Hunter,  a native of East Kilbride and a graduate of Glasgow University, who became a renowned anatomist and in London was appointed Physician to Queen Charlotte, and President of the Royal College of Physicians. He left his vast collection of books, coins, medals and paintings to Glasgow University and the Hunterian is still Scotland’s oldest public museum extant to this day. Glasgow then opened the second largest observatory in the UK after Greenwich, and even as the Napoleonic Wars were continuing, Glasgow was in a ferment of debate and discussion about everything from the stars above to the political future of Scotland and the world

There was no Scottish Revolution, however, at least not yet. The British Government’s brutal suppression of radicalism coupled with the war’s demand for men to fight against the French and their allies effectively sent the radical movement underground.

The Anglo-American War of 1812 was also a major concern to Glasgow that depended so much on cotton from American plantations. It also saw the revival of the Glengarry Fencibles, the regiment first raised in Glasgow whose membership, almost all Catholics from the Highlands, had emigrated en masse to Canada where they became the Glengarry Light Infantry and fought valiantly in that 1812 war.

In that same year, the great weavers’ strike took place in and around Glasgow. There had been industrial action by weavers in Calton, then outside the city,  in 1787, to try and prevent a wage cut – it ended with six weavers being shot dead - but the difference this time was that the weavers had organised themselves into a General Association of Operative Weavers in 1809, a sort of early trade union.

Manufacturers detested the Association precisely because it was affecting their profits. Weavers and other trades previously had the right to ask magistrates to adjudicate on wages and hours, and in the 1790s Glasgow magistrates regularly found in favour of the workers and ordered pay increases due to the rising cost of grain.

By 1812, those laws had been scrapped and as Professor Sir Tom Devine showed in his seminal work The Scottish Nation, A Modern History, that legal alternative to striking being cancelled left the weavers only one course of action to protest against their employers.

Devine wrote: “The catalyst was the great strike of 1812 when weavers’ unions in the west of Scotland sought to establish minimum payments for their work so as to enable a weaver ‘with fair hours and proper application to feed, clothe and accommodate himself and his family’.”

It was a noble cause. Find out next week what happened.