An Historical View earned Millar high acclaim on its first publication in 1787. This, the third edition, published posthumously, is greatly expanded with two volumes of material entrusted by Millar to his executors on his death-bed.
'these treatises contained such ingenious disquisitions on the rise of the influence of the Crown, and on the effects of extended commerce in giving birth to a spirit of independence in the people; they exhibited so animated a sketch of the changes produced by refinement on national character, and of the natural progress of poetical composition; that we thought, we should be doing injustice to the memory of our Friend, by witholding them from the world.' - John Craig in his Memoir of Millar
His account of the period from the House of Stewart to the Revolution is often in firm opposition to the Toryism of Hume's history, but, significantly, it is this work that has since been described as 'the closest approximation to economic history amongst all the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment' (Professor D. C. Coleman, History and the Economic Past, 1987). Above all, the work of Millar is now acknowledged as providing a crucial bridge between the social thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
