PUBLISHED IN: Eighteenth-Century Scotland: The Newsletter of the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, no. 29 (Spring 2015): 39–40. Regina Hewitt, ed., John Galt: Observations and Conjectures on Literature, History, and Society. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012. Pp. 382. It is rare for a collection of essays on any subject to be so remarkably cohesive and informative as the present volume, and credit goes to the expert reframing of John Galt by editor Regina Hewitt. As she argues in the introduction, Galt is an author whose time has come largely because the boundaries between scholarship on the eighteenth century and Romanticism have increasingly grown more porous, as have those between the humanities and social sciences. Preceded by P. H. Scott, Keith Costain, and others, Hewitt encourages us to view Galt as a storyteller much more indebted to conjectural history than usually acknowledged, but conjectural history of a resolutely heterodox kind. In particular, Galt was influenced, she proposes, by Adam Ferguson, long considered an outlier for his anti-progressivism and awareness of the perils of modern commercial society, and by a distinctly non-standard, contrarian Adam Smith. In turn, building on exciting new understandings of conjectural history as ultimately a species of imaginative writing, Hewitt encourages us to set aside its traditional associations with empirical evidence, situational explanations, and evolutionary historicism (all hallmarks of social-scientific thinking), and instead view conjectural history as fiction by other means. As often noted in this volume, Dugald Stewart in his Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith coined the phrase “theoretical or conjectural history” and thereby named a subgenre of eighteenth-century historiography. Such naming, however, is rarely a cool, neutral process; more commonly it represents a politically charged, if covert, legitimization of current assumptions and priorities. In this case, Stewart imbued the word “conjecture” with a positive spin and suppressed or remained ignorant of its negative connotations, such as those found in the opening pages of Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society. Alertness to such semantic contestation furthers Hewitt’s laudable treatment of the keywords “observation” and “conjecture” as “‘sensitized’ concepts” in the strict sociological sense (p. 2). Hewitt is specially equipped for this undertaking, given her two previous monographs on Romantic-era “sociology,” Scottish and otherwise, and the upshot of her approach is a laser- focused, sophisticated rethinking of Galt’s fiction as social knowledge. That her contributors, for the most part, also deepen our understanding of Galt as socially relevant only adds to the accumulating wisdom of this volume, a book unusually rewarding in the second or third read. For example, in the first essay in this collection, Gerard Carruthers ingeniously traces Galt’s direct influence on the biting Scottish modernism of George Douglas Brown and others, even as that very modernism “misremembered” (p. 42) Galt as airy, mawkish Kailyardism. There are thirteen other essays in this volume, including a final one by Hewitt, where she does double duty by carefully comparing Galt’s travel writings, fictional and otherwise, with those by his near contemporary Harriet Martineau (the latter, crucially, acknowledged recently as a pioneering social theorist). Collectively, these essays tackle an admirably wide share of Galt’s oeuvre, taking in perennial favorites as well as little or even never-before examined works, including: The Aryshire Legatees and The Steam-Boat (Ian Duncan), The Steam-Boat and Gathering of the West (Caroline McCracken-Flesher), Annals of the Parish (Martha Bohrer), Sir Andrew Wylie (Sharon Alker), Ringan Gilhaize (Alyson Bardsley), Rothelan and Sir Andrew Wylie (Clare A. Simmons), Travels and Observations of Hareach, the Wandering Jew (Elizabeth Kraft), Galt’s prolific