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    How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It
    How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It
    How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It
    Audiobook18 hours

    How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It

    Written by Arthur Herman

    Narrated by Robert Ian Mackenzie

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Who formed the first literate society? Who invented our modern ideas of democracy and free market capitalism? The Scots. As historian and author Arthur Herman reveals, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Scotland made crucial contributions to science, philosophy, literature, education, medicine, commerce, and politics-contributions that have formed and nurtured the modern West ever since. This book is not just about Scotland: it is an exciting account of the origins of the modern world. No one who takes this incredible historical trek will ever view the Scots-or the modern West-in the same way again.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateSep 16, 2016
    ISBN9781501931086
    How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It
    Author

    Arthur Herman

    ARTHUR HERMAN is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of nine books, including the New York Times bestseller How the Scots Invented the Modern World and Gandhi and Churchill, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Washington, DC.  

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    Reviews for How the Scots Invented the Modern World

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    • 4/5
      This was a pretty cool book. I think the title's a bit over the top, but Scots really did have a huge influence on the modern world. Hell, just look at the U.S. Constitution -- it wouldn't have been even remotely the same without the ideas of Scots such as Adam Smith and David Hume.

      There are lots of Scots covered in this book, everyone from Dr. Livingstone to Andrew Carnegie. Unfortunately, all of them are men. There are references to nameless groups of women, like the ones hired in textile mills, but none by name. Were there no Scottish women worth mentioning? Oh, wait, the book does mention one duchess. But that's it.

      Still, it was enjoyable and informative, and I definitely recommend it to anyone who is interested in Scottish history.
    • 4/5
      Terrible title but fascinating book. Almost avoided due to the hyperbole but glad I didn't. Eras connect seamlessly and everything makes sense and the book explained a lot I didn't understand about Scotland.
    • 5/5
      Fascinating book showing how the Scottish Enlightenment coming out of the unification of England and Scotland changed liberty, education, industry, architecture, literature in Scotland and around the world. The contributions of the Scottish diaspora from America to the modernization of India and Australia are often under valued.
    • 3/5
      During a school exchange to McCook, Nebraska, in the early 90s, my wife was asked whether they had television in Scotland. ‘We invented it,’ she frowned. Admittedly at the time this was somewhat disingenuous, since Nebraska even then had dozens of channels whereas Scotland had four (all of which were regularly interrupted by the fateful words ‘…except for viewers in Scotland’), but still, the point was made.It's one of the eternal mysteries why so much of the modern world seems to have come out of this remote, rainy corner on the edge of Europe. Most people will point to the technology – television, telephones, macadamised road surfaces, pneumatic tyres, the bicycle, penicillin, Buckfast. But even more important were the new concepts and attitudes that made it all possible. For two hundred years, from the start of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, Scotland churned out ideas at a ridiculous pace: David Hume remade empiricist philosophy, Adam Smith invented economics, Francis Hutcheson invented modern liberalism, James Hutton invented modern geology, Walter Scott invented modern fiction….I said it was an eternal mystery; one of the problems with this book is that the Scottish Enlightenment remains a bit of a mystery even after finishing it. Herman never quite escapes the sense of merely delivering a laundry-list of great names and inventions, most of which could be more or less grasped by consulting Wikipedia's article on Scottish inventions and discoveries.That said, Herman does make a few helpful suggestions. He is – at least historically – resolutely pro-Union, and identifies the creation of Great Britain in 1707 as the primary enabler of the Enlightenment, something that ‘in the span of a single generation […] would transform Scotland from a Third World country into a modern society, and open up a cultural and social revolution’. He also recognises the crucial importance of education, pinpointing Scotland as ‘Europe's first modern literate society’ – and this, in turn, is referred back to John Knox's insane but thorough religious reformation. (This has interesting consequences: the main figures of the French Enlightenment, to take one obvious comparison, were furiously anti-religion, but that was never the case in Scotland, where even atheists like Hume did not get very worked-up about it.)In the end, though, the explanations are speculative at best and distracting at worst – as are the sections which look at how Scots contributed to the founding principles of the United States. Herman is American, so perhaps this just reflects his own biases. In any case, without a convincing narrative through-line it's easy to find that the potted biographies start to blur into one another – though there are definitely people here that I'd like to read up on in more detail. I was particularly taken with the splenetic judge Lord Kames, who counted Hume, Boswell and Adam Smith among his protégés. When he stepped down from the justiciary in 1782, he took leave of his colleagues with the cheerful and surprisingly OG exclamation, ‘Fare ye weel, ye bitches!’, which I have now started saying whenever I leave the room.
    • 4/5
      The title of this book promises a lot and, as a Scot myself, I came to it predisposed to believe the author's contentions. Yes, Scots were influential thinkers in the Enlightenment period and yes, Scots have punched above their weight as inventors, but in an effort to prove his point Arthur Herman does stretch things quite a bit. Still, I'm glad I read the book, which was both informative and educational.
    • 3/5
      Rambling account of Scottish history. Over detailed. Didn't finish it. Just couldn't keep interested.
    • 3/5
      This is a cheeky, lively book, revealing the advantages of the earliest application of the policy of universal public education. The style is carried on successfully though I got rather more about the Scottish Enlightenment by reading the relevant parts of the "Story of Civilization" by Will and Ariel Durant. Good introduction to the topic that has spawned several imitators.
    • 4/5
      I have a Scottish friend who is always quick to point out how the Scots are behind all the great advances in history, so it was little surprise that he recommended "How the Scots invented the modern world". The author makes some interesting points about Scotland and its role in influencing European history but, as other reviewers have pointed out, Herman seems to stretch the idea of "Scottishness" to support his thesis so much I was fully expecting him to claim Tesla as Scottish. Still, I thought it a worthwhile read, and the fact I was in South Korea when I read this was an interesting experience in itself as one would struggle to find a more diametrically opposed nation to Scotland than the Republic of Korea.
    • 3/5
      I gave this a try because it was recommended on The Ultimate Reading List, under the history section, and the list has helped me discover some new favorites. But the very title did make me wary this would be a case of overreach, like that of two other history books on their list, Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization and Weatherford’s Genghis Khan & the Making of the Modern World. I thought Cahill’s book deserved an F; nothing within its pages came anywhere near substantiating its claims and by half-way through the book I decided it was junk history. Weatherford’s book came across as an apologia, nay propaganda, even if I did think it had some interesting material--but I kept feeling the other side was being hidden from me. Herman’s book does suffer from overreach, even distortion. At times he really does stretch things in efforts to claim credit for Scots. For instance, he claims that Gibbon’s masterpiece, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire owes a great deal to Scottish models of history and that Gibbons was “intellectually a Scott.” He gives Scots a lot of credit for the American Revolution on such flimsy grounds as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison being educated in schools on the Scottish model. Scholars, Herman claimed, joke that the Scot David Hume is the “real” author of James Madison’s Federalist 10. On the other hand, in his largely uncritical portrait of Sir Walter Scott, he fails to mention Mark Twain’s famous claim that Scott’s "romanticization of battle" created a Southern culture that led to the American Civil War. He gives credit to Bell and Langley for the “first airplane” and as evidence notes that the Smithsonian Institute hung up their plane rather than Wright’s. Herman fails to mention, a detail I read in a recent book, that was due to a feud between the Wrights and the Smithsonian--not a superior claim of Bell and Langley’s craft for first airplane.That’s why I felt I had to rank this so low. I’m not even a historian or buff of Scottish history, so if this is what I caught, there had to be more I didn’t. And yet it’s a shame. I knew little of the Scottish Enlightenment, and Herman does shine detailing that intellectual history. He does deal with the most famous thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Smith--but he also treats seminal thinkers I’d never heard of such as Francis Hutcheson and Lord Kames. He made me want to read them, and made me feel that when I do I’ll better understand them and their impact because of reading this book. I also appreciated Herman’s efforts to debunk a lot of the myths that have accumulated about Highlanders, the clan, and Bonnie Prince Charlie. As Herman says in the Preface, in “1700 Scotland was Europe’s poorest independent country” yet by the end of that century it had the highest literary rate and Voltaire would say it “is to Scotland that we look for our idea of civilization.” Herman explains what happened in between, and it often makes for an entertaining read. This isn’t one of the books that reads like a novel, but it’s not bone dry either, but I left the book feeling I couldn’t trust the history.
    • 1/5
      This history has an intriguing title, and I could not wait to dive in. One of my primary teaching specialties is British Literature, so I know something about the early history of Scotland. I hoped to add to that knowledge.Unfortunately, I was greatly disappointed. Not only was the prose deadly dull, but the humor was so subtle and so deeply buried, not even a smile broke the hours I struggled through the first 100 pages. If this had not been on the list of reads for my book club, I would have invoked the “Rule of 50” around about page ten.Furthermore, while the premise seems to have some plausibility, many of the connections with the Scots are tenuous at best and extremely flimsy at worst. For example, in 1579, George Buchanan asserted the authority of government arises from the people. Herman thus lays claim to this “invention,” which Locke thoroughly examined and enabled the ideas to actually come to fruition (18-19). Technically speaking, this embryonic idea of democracy belongs to the Golden Age of Athenian culture, which developed the idea much more fully.If I was more frugal, I might be upset that I wasted the money for this book. The chapter on the relationship of the clans and their connection to English Royalty – which embodied what I already knew about the early history of Scotland – was somewhat interesting. However, this is hardly enough to redeem this work. 1 star--Jim, 1/27/12
    • 4/5
      Substance: Lots of information about lots of influential people and events. Lots of people you know about I bet you didn't know were Scots.Style: Straight-forward and informative. Maybe a little hagiographic about Scotland per se.
    • 4/5
      Intriguing and interesting read. I'm always interested in how science, politics and religion played off each other in the past. However, I think the author was a little to generous in crediting Scot's with inventions
    • 4/5
      This work is an intellectual history of the Scottish Enlightenment which occurred from approximately 1700 to 1900. The first half of the book covers this quite efficiently while the second half goes on to list the contributions of Scots in various fields and various countries. Some of the connections are, I must say, rather peripheral.This is an easy book to read. It flows well and is clear and detailed. It covered an era in Scotland I knew nothing about. The bibliography is detailed but I somewhat dislike the format. I can recommend this book.
    • 5/5
      This is one of the most significant books of the past 100 years. It is a thorough, well developed, and well written account of the cradle of contemporary liberty in the Western World [along, perhaps, with Holland]. I have been studying that development for nearly forty years, and still learned a lot from this book. It is one of those "put it all together" volumes that should be read by everyone interested in either Scotland or Western liberty.
    • 3/5
      I read this book because I work with a lot of people from Scotland and am regularly told that the Scots invented everything. So, I thought I would see how true it is. My conclusion is that it appears from this book that the Scots invented a lot of things.I say appears because I think that the author was probably not looking at inventions and discoveries outside of Western Europe.I think I expected the book to be more of a listing of things invented by Scots, when it was more of a history. I learned a lot - and maybe that's because I'm pretty ignorant of Scottish/British/English history. For example, I had never heard of the Scottish Enlightenment.This history starts in the early 1700's and sets the stage for the Scots to 'invent the modern world'. The pillar for this was that Scotland boasted an amazing literacy rate, estimated to be as high as 75% by 1750, due to the School Act, where the Kirk (the Scottish Presbyterian church) required a school in every parish.Something that bugged me about the book is when the author would take credit for inventions and discoveries of people who were not Scottish, but because the person in question worked with the Scottish historical school or had friends that were Scottish, for example. The author really took this far when he claimed for Scotland Thomas Jefferson because Thomas Jefferson's alma mater had been later overhauled in the Scottish university model.He also ascribed to John Witherspoon (president of Princeton starting 1768) a role in the American Revolution that I question (based on some of the other exaggerations in the book). I had never heard of Witherspoon's role and will have to do some more reading about the American Revolution to confirm it.I wasn't sure how I was going to rate this book until just now, after completing this review. I'm giving it 2.5 stars because the disingenuousness of the author made me doubt some of his conclusions.
    • 3/5
      This was a bit of a disappointment: I was expecting a book about the great flowering of intellectual life in eighteenth-century Scotland, which is rather what the UK title (The Scottish Enlightenment : the Scots' invention of the modern world) implies. In the US, the title is much more brazen: How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It, and gives the potential reader fair warning that we should expect more tripe hype than serious history. The book starts off well enough, with a discussion of the political situation of Scotland at the end of the 17th century, and a lively account of the negotiations for the Treaty of Union. Then we get a clear but very condensed run though the lives and ideas of Lord Kames, David Hume, Adam Smith et al. All well and good, although rather disappointingly superficial if you already know something about the subject and were hoping to learn a little more. But this only gets us about halfway through the book. The remaining chapters are a bit of a ragbag: the author leaps about here and there in 19th and 20th century history, picking out significant figures who were, or could be considered on the author's rather free definition, Scottish. In places, it's a bit like being trapped in one of those silly coffee-break conversations, where someone is trying to prove the superiority of a particular nation or group with increasingly far-fetched examples ("...and he was Scottish, ...and he had a Scottish grandmother, ... and he went to lectures by a Scottish professor, ... and he once read a novel by Scott..."). Or, to put it another way, like reading a history of the nineteenth century where someone has Tippexed out all Russians, Germans, French, and English.This is a rather silly exercise, and the off the cuff judgments it leads the author into undermine what might otherwise have been quite a sensible book (what is the point of bringing in Asquith [married to a Scot] but not mentioning Lloyd George [Welsh], for instance?). But there are some good bits - the discussion of Sir Walter Scott and his influence on the way Scotland is perceived, for instance. It would have been nice to see Herman take the discussion of why Scotland (compared to England, in particular) was so successful at producing great thinkers a bit further. Why were the Scottish universities better than the English ones? Was it the absence of control by a state church? Was it that the universities took on vocational training that was done by professional associations in England? Why were Scottish universities more accessible to men from poorer backgrounds, and how common was it really that the sons of farmworkers and small tradesmen went to university?Herman's real agenda with this book seems to be not so much to defend the Scots - after all, anyone who reflects for a moment could work out for themselves that Scots have played an important part in history - as to make a plea for the liberal humanist way of looking at the world that 18th century Scottish thinkers did so much to establish as the common currency of the academic world, and which took such a battering in the latter part of the 20th century. This is perhaps also why he doesn't mention any women (except Flora MacDonald) and doesn't discuss women's role in Scottish society at all - a remarkable omission for a book written in 2003. However, he does offer a useful corrective to the "Mel Gibson" view of Scottish history inadvertently encouraged by Scott and propagated by modern Scottish Nationalists. He reminds us that the Scots-speaking culture of Edinburgh, Glasgow and the lowlands is a part of Scotland's heritage every bit as important as that of the the Gaelic-speaking Highlanders.
    • 4/5
      I loved all the fun facts. Entertaining and educational read.
    • 4/5
      Convincing argument about the Scot's connection to classical law, architecture, practical philosophy, and education. Edinburgh become an important center of ideas due to Enlightenment academics and religious persons mixing in a new environment with merchants and tradesmen. A very practical philosophy resulted. Poverty was an important factor, having produced a frugal, hardy, and resourceful people. Herman also covers the importance of citizen militia and nationalist pride, and dispels myths, including the evolution of tartans). Summary quote: "The great insight of the modern Enlightenment was to insist that human beings need to free themselves from myths and to see the world as it really is."
    • 4/5
      The title says it all. A very good case is presented on Scotland's various contributions to the world via economic theory, philosophy, political theory, architecture, etc.