A rapid succession of Scottish inventors, engineers, doctors, and scientists proved their point to the rest of the world. In it Buchanan asserted that all political authority ultimately belonged to the people, who came together to elect someone, whether a king or a body of magistrates, to manage their affairs. How the Irish Saved Civilization , Crown may be hoping for comparable sales—but probably won't achieve them. How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It 0.

Adam Smith would compose the founding text of modern economics— Inquiry Concerning the Wealth of Nations—in a language that was, it is all too easy to forget, a foreign tongue to him. It had turned its back not only on Scotland's past, but on all purely secular values, no matter what the source. The Scotland of William Wallace is not the Scotland that Arthur Herman celebrates in "How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It. They are “guilty,” “not guilty,” and “not proven,” which jurors invoke when they decide the prosecution has failed to make a compelling case even when the prisoner is obviously guilty. Scottish colonial administrators, like James Mill, were instrumental in formulating the idea of the civilizing mission, which posited that Europeans should take over indigenous cultures and run their society for their own good, as part of " the white man's burden".Rather, it was more beneficial, and ultimately more rational, than ones put together by politicians or rulers, who are themselves creatures of their own passions and whims. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

For more than two thousand years Western philosophers had praised the primacy of reason as the guide to all human action and virtue.

Like Robertson, Carlyle, and the other Edinburgh student volunteers, they were Whigs, but less from conviction than out of practical self-interest. Scottish merchants and capitalists, like their American counterparts, recognized the advantages of a laissez-faire private sector far earlier than did the English or other Europeans. Focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries, Herman (coordinator of the Western Heritage Program at the Smithsonian and an assistant professor of history at George Mason University) has written a successful exploration of Scotland's disproportionately large impact on the modern world's intellectual and industrial development.