How the Scots Invented the Modern World

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Herman works hard to dismantle the romantic vision many have of the clans and clan system, and appears to do so objectively. Union gave Scotland access to England's global marketplace, triggering an economic and cultural boom "transform[ing] Scotland. This is one of the most crude, reductive and ill informed books I have read on the subject of the Scottish contribution to modernity.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of

From educators to scientists and engineers, Herman’s position is that Scots were responsible for the birth of what we would now think of as ‘modernity’. The rest of the first section of the book is taken up with a wide-ranging history of eighteenth century Scotland. Herman backs up his incredible title with myriad evidence that really supports how Scottish blood has invigorated and established some of the best concepts and inventions that have come out of the past three centuries or so. To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, HarperCollins, 2004 ISBN 978-0060534240.

The first three quarters of this book are absolutely amazing, showing how the Scottish Enlightenment period essentially created all modern political and philosophical teachings in the modernized world. While I found this a most informative and enjoyable read (who doesn’t enjoy having their national ego stroked? Firstly, there was a large injection of rationalism into religious thinking by key prominant players. Critics found the thesis to be over-reaching but descriptive of the Scots' disproportionate impact on modernity. This book also tells the negative parts of Scottish history; the revolutions, uprisings, famines etc.

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Equality of all before god, working to god's glory, and recognising god in the observable facts of nature were principles carried into the heart of Scottish society.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. 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….

How the Scots Invented the Modern World How the Scots Invented the Modern World

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. To be completely honest, it's hard to find a better written book out there, regardless of the obviously hyperbolic title. Good thing is that it is jam-packed with multiple events and inventions that brought in Industrial revolution and many other changes, which indeed made our world what it is today, more or less. While I thought some Scottish connections were stretched a bit thin, and I figure most nations or cultures could come up with their own claims, I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it, in fact, I would like to own this book, which from me is a high recommendation. In 2008, he added to his body of work Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

The book lives up to the subtitle "created out world and everything in it" though towards the end I felt the author might be overreaching to prove his point. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Herman taught at Sewanee: The University of the South, George Mason University, Georgetown and The Catholic University of America. Any definition of the modern world that rests solely on Britain and America (with cursory nods to Canada and Australia) is one that is laughable. Most people will point to the technology – television, telephones, macadamised road surfaces, pneumatic tyres, the bicycle, penicillin, Buckfast.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World (PDF) Arthur Herman. How the Scots Invented the Modern World

If indeed true, then perhaps when one says that Greece and Rome are the cradles of European civilisation it could also be stated that Scotland is the cradle of modern civilisation.Herman gave quite a bit of space to David Livingstone, the missionary to Africa, who also happened to study chemistry with a classmate, Lord Kelvin! He also correctly highlights how in the 18th and 19th centuries Scotland's advanced educational system and highly developed economy gave Scottish emigrants, or at least the Lowland ones, a huge head start over the illiterate peasantry of Southern and Eastern Europe and Ireland who were their competitors in the New World. I was particularly taken with the splenetic judge Lord Kames, who counted Hume, Boswell and Adam Smith among his protégés.