How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It
by Arthur Herman
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Book Summary Information
Author: Arthur HermanEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2002-09-24
ISBN: 0609809997
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Book Reviews of How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It
Book Review: Serious charges against the Scots
Summary: 4 Stars
If the Scots created the modern world, then they are responsible for its current mess. Yet nearly all the Scots mentioned in this book by Arthur Herman seem to be "good guys" who did no particular harm except to set things in motion and then conveniently die. Or at least the author tells us of precious few bad Scots. And what of the English, the Jews, the Armenians, the Greeks and Romans, ad infinitum? What were their contributions to the current state of affairs? The author presents a somewhat uneven account of the glories of the Scotchmen (no women that I recall) who did this and that and the other to make things what they are. The impression is given that the Scots did everything, or nearly so. But that clearly cannot be the case. Why? But the author does not get into that. After all, this is a book about the Scots, not about the other guys. Amazon sells a biography about Thomas Edison with a similar title. So one might think Edison's accomplishment matched what all these Scots did collectively. But that seems to me to exaggerate the case. So this volume left me with a bit of wonderment: how is it nobody knew the Scots did all these things before the author laid them before our eyes. So read carefully.
While the book is well written, parts drag a bit and the whole thing seemed to take forever to get through. Now I'd like to see somebody write "How the Swiss invented the modern world", or some such.
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Summary of How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It
Who formed the first modern nation?Who created the first literate society?
Who invented our modern ideas of democracy and free market capitalism?
The Scots.
Mention of Scotland and the Scots usually conjures up images of kilts, bagpipes, Scotch whisky, and golf. But as historian and author Arthur Herman demonstrates, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Scotland earned the respect of the rest of the world for its crucial contributions to science, philosophy, literature, education, medicine, commerce, and politics-contributions that have formed and nurtured the modern West ever since.
Arthur Herman has charted a fascinating journey across the centuries of Scottish history. He lucidly summarizes the ideas, discoveries, and achievements that made this small country facing on the North Atlantic an inspiration and driving force in world history. Here is the untold story of how John Knox and the Church of Scotland laid the foundation for our modern idea of democracy; how the Scottish Enlightenment helped to inspire both the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution; and how thousands of Scottish immigrants left their homes to create the American frontier, the Australian outback, and the British Empire in India and Hong Kong.
How the Scots Invented the Modern World reveals how Scottish genius for creating the basic ideas and institutions of modern life stamped the lives of a series of remarkable historical figures, from James Watt and Adam Smith to Andrew Carnegie and Arthur Conan Doyle, and how Scottish heroes continue to inspire our contemporary culture, from William "Braveheart" Wallace to James Bond.
Victorian historian John Anthony Froude once proclaimed, "No people so few in number have scored so deep a mark in the world's history as the Scots have done." And no one who has taken this incredible historical trek, from the Highland glens and the factories and slums of Glasgow to the California Gold Rush and the search for the source of the Nile, will ever view Scotland and the Scots-or the modern West-in the same way again. For this is a story not just about Scotland: it is an exciting account of the origins of the modern world and its consequences.
"The point of this book is that being Scottish turns out to be more than just a matter of nationality or place of origin or clan or even culture. It is also a state of mind, a way of viewing the world and our place in it. . . . This is the story of how the Scots created the basic idea of modernity. It will show how that idea transformed their own culture and society in the eighteenth century, and how they carried it with them wherever they went. Obviously, the Scots did not do everything by themselves: other nations-Germans, French, English, Italians, Russians, and many others-have their place in the making of the modern world. But it is the Scots more than anyone else who have created the lens through which we see the final product. When we gaze out on a contemporary world shaped by technology, capitalism, and modern democracy, and struggle to find our place as individuals in it, we are in effect viewing the world as the Scots did. . . . The story of Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is one of hard-earned triumph and heart-rending tragedy, spilled blood and ruined lives, as well as of great achievement."
-FROM THE PREFACE
"I am a Scotsman," Sir Walter Scott famously wrote, "therefore I had to fight my way into the world." So did any number of his compatriots over a period of just a few centuries, leaving their native country and traveling to every continent, carving out livelihoods and bringing ideas of freedom, self-reliance, moral discipline, and technological mastery with them, among other key assumptions of what historian Arthur Herman calls the "Scottish mentality."
It is only natural, Herman suggests, that a country that once ranked among Europe's poorest, if most literate, would prize the ideal of progress, measured "by how far we have come from where we once were." Forged in the Scottish Enlightenment, that ideal would inform the political theories of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and David Hume, and other Scottish thinkers who viewed "man as a product of history," and whose collective enterprise involved "nothing less than a massive reordering of human knowledge" (yielding, among other things, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, first published in Edinburgh in 1768, and the Declaration of Independence, published in Philadelphia just a few years later). On a more immediately practical front, but no less bound to that notion of progress, Scotland also fielded inventors, warriors, administrators, and diplomats such as Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie, Simon MacTavish, and Charles James Napier, who created empires and great fortunes, extending Scotland's reach into every corner of the world.
Herman examines the lives and work of these and many more eminent Scots, capably defending his thesis and arguing, with both skill and good cheer, that the Scots "have by and large made the world a better place rather than a worse place." --Gregory McNamee
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