This book has been a long time in the making. In 2005, I was privileged to be awarded a personal chair in History by the University of Dundee, and at the 'Discovery Day' lecture series held for new chairs I gave a talk entitled, 'A Modest Defence of Gaming', the title plundered from a rare eighteenth-century pamphlet actually defending gambling. The talk was supposed to be a taster of the sorts of themes which I then thought would inform a new research project on gaming in Britain and its first empire between c.1660-1830. Very quickly thereafter, however, another research project, a major collaborative one on the provincial town in Enlightenment Scotland, took over the bulk of my attention, although I kept collecting material from various archives and keeping my eyes peeled for leads and helpful reading on gambling. Even when the project on Scottish provincial towns was completed, which was in 2014, I turned not to gambling but writing an account of the life of the later eighteenth century Scottish aristocratic republican radical, Lord Daer. Once gambling did become the main preoccupation of my research, it rapidly became clear that identifying further sources was not going to be easy, and these were going to be dispersed across many, geographically disparate collections. Confronted with this challenge, and the difficulties raised by framing a convincing study of gambling, my confidence in the project, it must be said, waned at points"--