In 1707, the kingdom of Scotland was poor, bankrupt, racked by famine and poor harvests, and divided between quarreling and illiterate Highland clans in the north, and fanatical Presbyterians in the south, who burned witches and hanged blasphemers.
Four decades later, Scotland was on track to become the economic and intellectual driving engine of Great Britain, and eventually the British Empire. Its merchants and inventors like James Watt were laying the foundations of what would become the Industrial Revolution; its thinkers, scientists, and professors like Adam Smith were finding a way to recast our understanding of humanity, including the nature of modern society--even the idea of human freedom—in an intellectual movement we call the Scottish Enlightenment.
The monuments to the Scots’ achievements would not only be James Watt’s steam engine and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, or the New Town of Edinburgh and George Square in Glasgow. They would include entire branches of human knowledge such as anthropology and economics; an entirely new genre of literature of historical fiction thanks to Sir Walter Scott; and the ideas about liberty in the modern world that would underlie the First Reform Bill in England and the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States.
Theirs is the story of How The Scots Invented the Modern World, and it’s a story that continues to fascinate. In 2001 the book I published with that title became a New York Times bestseller and a semi-finalist for the Johnson Prize in the U.K—not to mention a best-seller in Scotland. It continues to find readers and translators (translations in Japanese and Chinese already exist, and the Spanish translation is due out this year). There is something about this story of how a poor undeveloped nation came to lead the world into the future, that grips the imagination and is as astonishing for readers today, as it was to those who were there in 1707, when the kingdom of Scotland itself ceased to exist, and its people’s future couldn’t have seemed bleaker.
So how did they do it?
First, thanks to that same narrow-minded Presbyterian Church, Scotland’s population in 1707 enjoyed an extraordinarily high level of literacy and numeracy. At a time when the vast majority of adult Europeans could never read or write, every Scottish boy and girl was required by law to learn to read, in order to be able to read Holy Scripture. One English observer found with amazement that, “in the low country of Scotland… the poorest are, in general, taught to read.” Male literacy in Scotland in 1720 stood at an amazing 55 percent: by 1750 it may have been as high as 75 percent. It wasn’t until the 1880’s that their more “advanced” neighbors in England caught with the Scots.
This meant, of course, that Scottish men and women could not only read the Bible, but other books, as well. As religious censorship faded away in the eighteenth century, the result was a literary explosion, with a genuine readership for authors like Adam Smith, the philosopher David Hume, and geologist ---as well as the poets Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott. A high degree of literacy also meant Scotland could provide the foundations for a skilled workforce, not only in Scotland but whether Scots chose to go.
Second, in 1707 the Scots lost their power of self-rule, thanks to the Act of Union with Great Britain. At the time, the end of independence caused enormous consternation and deep regret; but it also meant Scots had no politics to distract their energies or worry about. All the important decisions were now made in London, not in Edinburgh or Holyrood. Instead, middle class Scots could focus on getting rich and the economic improvement of their towns and cities, while those with political ambitions learned to head south--where their energy and insights would gradually stir southerners out of their conservative complacency and stir an entire movement of political and social reform, culminating in the First Reform Bill of 1832.
Third, the fruits of high literacy meant Scotland enjoyed a constellation of universities that recruited and stimulated the best minds, as well as alert and intelligent students from all social classes. The universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen were hubs of intellectual excellence compared to Oxford or Cambridge of the same era. A professor like Adam Smith found himself surrounded by brilliant colleagues, who were transforming the study of human society and science of humanity, but the natural sciences, as well.
In short, the “sudden burst of genius” that is supposed to characterize the Scottish Enlightenment was hardly sudden. It was built on solid foundations of a society in which books and ideas were taken seriously, and where the striving for truth and understanding—and making money doing both--was more important than competing for political power.
Nonetheless, that burst did come as something of a surprise to the Scots themselves. One of the brightest lights of the Scottish Enlightenment, the philosopher David Hume, summed up Scotland’s remarkable position in the world by the mid-1700s this way:
“Is it not strange that at a time when we have lost our Princes, our Parliaments, our independent government, even the Presence of our chief Nobility, are unhappy in our accent and pronunciation, speak a very corrupt Dialect of the Tongue which we make use of, is it not strange, I say, that in these Circumstances, we shou’d really be the People most distinguished for Literature in Europe?”
Yet what led Hume, Adam Smith, and other Scottish thinkers to the forefront of the intellectual life of Europe was their insights into how human beings could use their great changes in the social and economic patterns brought by capitalism and then the Industrial Revolution, to their advantage. Those insights can be summed up in four propositions:
- That modern liberty requires a sense of personal obligation, as well as the protection of individual rights.
- That the advancement of science and technology can thrive side by side with an appreciation of the creative arts.
- That affluence and prosperity can be spiritually fulfilling, as well as materially rewarding.
- That political democracy without economic democracy, is doomed to failure.
The final factor that unleashed the Scots on the modern world was the breaking of the power of the Highland clans in the north at the battle of Culloden in 1745 and the brutal reprisals that followed. The result was that a restless population gave up its ancestral land (sometimes willingly, more often unwillingly) to landlords’ flocks of sheep, and spread across the globe to bring their talents to other places and peoples—including their gift for seeing hard work as an obligation, rather than an imposition.
The “Scottish diaspora” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries swept over Britain’s colonies in North America, and in the Caribbean (American founding father Alexander Hamilton was born the illegitimate son of a Scottish West Indies merchant). They also went to India and settled in Australia and South Africa and became the backbone of the British Empire.
Scottish immigrants supplied the brains but also the hands that turned the wheels of industry in the nineteenth century, including in their homeland where Glasgow and Dundee became major hubs of the Industrial Revolution, with their teeming factories and shipyards.
By the mid-nineteenth century Britain’s Royal Navy virtually couldn’t sail without its Scottish engineers; its hospitals couldn’t operate without its Scottish doctors like Joseph Lister, the father of sterilization. Its roads and bridges and railroads depended on Scottish builders like Thomas Telford, while its universities became indebted to the insights of Scottish intellectuals like Thomas Macaulay and Charles Darwin—not to mention the earlier generation of enlightened Scots like Adam Smith and David Hume.
And if Europe’s nineteenth literary culture was decisively shaped by a Scot, namely Sir Walter Scott and his series of historical novels that romanticized Scotland’s past in order to inspire the present (he was Otto von Bismarck’s favorite author), twentieth century literature would also be transformed by two Scots.
The first was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose literary creation, the detective Sherlock Holmes, was based on a pathologist professor of his at the University of Edinburgh, Doctor Joseph Bell.
The other was Scottish-born Ian Fleming, whose iconic fictional hero, James Bond, is not only a Scot by birth but educated in schools in Edinburgh (Fleming’s model for Bond was a real-life Scottish adventurer and sometime spy, Fitzroy Maclean of the Special Air Service, as well as Fleming himself).
As an iconic film hero for nearly six decades, Bond still inhabits our contemporary world with ease, mastering and overcoming every type of gadgetry and brutal villainy modernity can throw at him—not a surprising result, since so much of that modern world was the creation of his countrymen, from TV and antibiotics to our global time zones (first laid out by the Scottish engineer Stanford Fleming).
But Bond himself was a literary creation in the 1950s and early 1960’s, when Scotland’s place in the industrial world was declining, while there was a growing discontent at home with the place Scotland had come to occupy in the modern British system: always taken for granted but rarely recognized or rewarded.
The first serious break came when four Edinburgh students stole the Stone of Scone, on which every English monarch had been crowned since 1306 and returned it to its original home in Edinburgh. Suddenly Scottish nationalists were quoting the fourteenth century Declaration of Arbroath, which pledged Scots to resist ‘the yoke of English dominion,” and a new political party, the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), was born.
Then came the discovery of North Sea oil off Scottish shores, as Scots realized they could, if they wished, play a significant part in the making of the next modern world. Then at last, in 2001, the clamor for some degree of autonomy for Scotland, if not actual independence, reached a crescendo with the granting of Devolution by the Parliament in Westminster.
A new spirit of hope and possibilities sprang up across Scotland, which coincided with the publication of my book. Whether the Scots really did invent the modern world, and whether that was a good thing or not, became an object of debate in the media and in the new Scottish Parliament (I was even asked to serve on the Scottish Arts Council, the first non-Scot to receive that honor).
Yet the optimism, even a sense that Scotland was one on the verge of a new Enlightenment as sweeping and innovative as its eighteenth-century version, proved premature. Instead, developments at Holyrood bogged down in political faction fighting and battles over subsidies from the home government in London, instead of charting an entirely new course.
Ironically, the coming of Brexit, which was fiercely resisted in Scotland where the EU was seen as a much-needed lifeline versus an indifferent or even hostile government in Westminster, gave a new lease on life for SNP, in hopes that Scotland might rejoin EU on its own: hopes, like so many since Devolution, that proved forlorn.
Most recently, devolution politics in Scotland has seemed stuck at an impasse. Perhaps because what had seemed a gift, Devolution, proved to be a curse. It injected the distraction of politics into the formula for the future, when the best path was to think about where Scotland could best fit itself into a modern system once again, through cultural, scientific, and economic innovations, rather than political ones. As a result, the persistent problems of immigration; decaying schools and infrastructure; an urban landscape denuded of industry and hope for both young and old; seem almost intractable, whether seen from Westminster or Holyrood.
Today’s Scots, it seems, have forgotten the lesson their forbears taught many years before, that history is not kind to those who treat themselves as victims, but smiles on those who take their destiny into their own hands and shape the future rather than wait for it to happen. That sense of personal empowerment is perhaps their most important contribution to the making of the modern world, and the world that’s still to come.
From that perspective, the Scottish spirit is needed now more than ever, and not only in Scotland. In the words of one of the finest products of both the Scottish Diaspora and Scottish Enlightenment, Australian-born Oxford classicist Sir Gilbert Murray, “the Uncharted surrounds us on every side.” Our future depends on being “careful always to seek for truth and not for our own emotional satisfaction, careful not to neglect the real needs of men and women through basing our life on dreams; and remembering above all to walk gently in a world where the lights are dim and the very stars wander.”
Arthur Herman is the bestselling author of How the Scots Invented the Modern World, The Idea of Decline in Western History, To Rule the Waves, andGandhi & Churchill, which was a 2009 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Dr. Herman taught the Western Heritage Program at the Smithsonian’s Campus on the Mall, and he has been a professor of history at Georgetown University, The Catholic University of America, George Mason University, and The University of the South at Sewanee. He currently serves as a senior fellow at Hudson Institute.
Arthur Herman