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

Rating:
Summary: Great summary of the scope of Scot's history and influence
Review: I enjoy an author who is able to show historical links over time, and who is able and provide a coherent "story" of how the world we enjoy came to be. I think Arthur Herman has done that extraordinarily well, and has integrated some of the dusty academics (Hume, Adam Smith, et. al.) in a way that makes them interesting (and even exciting?). If you are from a state which saw immigrations of Scots in the 1715's, 1745's or 1800's, you will be fascinated by how they brought their ways of thinking to this country and influenced how you (or others)think today.

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Summary: A fine, wink-of-an-eye tribute
Review: I loved this book, in all its merry, whimsical wisdom. The irony and humor-impaired should be forewarned, however.

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Summary: Uneasy
Review: None of the information given in this book is documented with footnotes. There are some general attributes given for each chapter at the end of the book. It just makes me uneasy that the material does not come with adequate sources.Especially after one glaring error is to be found throughout the description of the religious clashes between the Scots and the English.The author refers to the Church of England as being the Episcopal Church. It is not. That would be the Anglican Church as opposed to the Episcopal Church or religion in the U.S. The Anglican Church became the Episcopal Church,in this country, after the Revolutionary War. The English monarchy is the head of the Church of England and we fought that deadly war to found our country's independence from the English monarchy.
I found that I couldn't really finish this book because of my doubts.

Rating:
Summary: Neat Book
Review: I'm all for bold and provocative titles, and I suppose this book's title is appropriate for the subject matter. When I was about half way through though, I read some of my fellow Amazon readers' comments about the author's lack of supporting information and sources for some of his claims. As I continued reading, I was more aware of this, and it did begin to bother me to see unsupported claims presented as fact. On the whole though, it was a great read. Call it boosterism if you want, but the writing is definitely accessible to all readers and on subjects and themes so diverse that the connections the author makes between them often make for more interesting reading that the colorful stories themselves.

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Summary: Trendy Tartan Tutorial
Review: I've seen this kind of narrow, linear dissertation too often before, most conspicuous in James Burke's tedious "Connections" via the BBC and PBS, the godfather of obscurity. I opened Herman with equal optimism and closed it with near identical despair for coherent objectivity, a horse that won't run probably of the Trojan variety.

In charting sequential historical underpinnings one must accept (reluctantly by some) the detached framework laid down by both linear and lateral catalysts and triggers. Herman's treatise strongly reminds me of one seizing upon a single thread protruding from a sweater, then unraveling the garment from its midsection irrespective of sleeves, collar or hem which in fact denote its termini. His historical framework is built inward upon itself not unlike an M.C. Escher etching with no discernible beginning or end, the whole teetering on a driven need for preeminent firsts.

I need not dwell on its nuts and bolts because the framework these attach is fundamentally flawed. Strange though that many of these frequently Anglo-Scots increments exclude parallel if not surpassing contemporary equivalents--largely English and French--in this quest to amplify all achievements Scottish. In his prologue and elsewhere Herman ventures the ultimate overstatement--"In fact, the very notion of `human history' is itself...a largely Scottish invention." Poor Herodotus. Genius knows no nationality.

The result is advocacy rather than insight. He argues reasonably well but does not convince, this despite my own personal affinity for the Scots. Before writing he should have read Charles Freeman's "The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World" (Penguin, 1999). It would have confined him to chronicling the admittedly valuable admixture of the Scottish Enlightenment without resorting to hyperbolous claims. To use his own catch phrase, the creation of "our world and everything in it"--science, arts, government, philosophy, humanities--are inescapably the seminal purview of the Ionian, Athenian, and Spartan Greeks, self-evident for generations. The term "pop revisionist" looms.

In his "Bonfire of the Humanities" Victor Davis Hanson rightly railed against this attractive latter-day urge to embark upon a historical survey from midstream irrespective of classical foundations, which invariably begets preconception and skewed personal bias. Every hypothesis has at least one assumption, but recorded history is by definition anti-hypothetical and frequently thereby damaged. The demise of classical education, coupled to concurrent abandonment of the languages which record early foundations of human knowledge, represent a form of radical, self-inflicted brain surgery. Herein lies the root of the "dumbing-down" process so in evidence today.

Herman is just another pop history storyteller. Opinion and cleverness (as well marketing) substitute for intelligent insight grounded in hard-won structured knowledge. His bibliography is weak and grossly skewed. If one ventures into a grocery store looking for a can of peas, he will invariably find a can of peas. If, on the other hand, he enters planning a full-course meal his mind and imagination remain open to all options. Herman prefers Scottish-grown peas precariously balanced on a sharp dirk.

Herman's premise was flawed from the start. He seeks to elevate Scots to the significance of seminal groundbreakers irrespective of preceding Greek and Roman achievements, the Renaissance, Dutch dissemination of inquiring free thought through vigorous free world trade, the incipient French Enlightenment, as well English and parallel Celtic efforts with which were made concurrent forward strides toward what we call the modern Western world. Entrepreneurship of the Scottish diaspora didn't function within a vacuum. To suggest that it did, by either omission or deliberate exclusion, is deeply counter-intuitive. Myopia can be corrected with glasses; this book cannot, tartan blindness actually. Where pedestals are built the pyramid of human knowledge becomes flattened.

It's logical that this fellow found a home at the Smithsonian, birds of a feather down to the Indiana Jones fedora, pop history for pop culture and, I might add, pop careers. Publish or perish. This one ranks right up there with "America B.C." and "Black Athena." Novelty is quick and profitable, hopefully with a dash of controversy to season the stew. Structured knowledge is time consuming, even painful, rarely monetarily rewarding but of infinite value to future generations. Anything else is intentionally disposable literature, fleeting entertainment. I have to agree (and chuckle) with an Amazon reviewer who branded it "reductive cr*p." Buchan's "Crowded With Genius" appears no better.

The man most singularly responsible for propelling us into a truly "modern" Western world (perhaps a post-modernist one) was in fact Italian--Guglielmo Marconi, representative of yet another impoverished nation long dominated from without. There's irony for you. He too was beset by envious intellectual thieves ill at ease with their own mediocrity.

"The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice."

--Marcus Tullius Cicero

My advice: Caveat emptor.


Rating:
Summary: You Don't Have To be a Scot-o-phile To Enjoy This Book!
Review: You do need to be a lover of modern history, though, and if you are you will be amazed at the influence the Scots have had.

This book is very well written, and draws on a wealth of Scots characters who are engaging and fascinating for their influence on every facet of Modern Western society. The author's style, though clearly based on scholarly research, is very accesible and entertaining. I found the section dealing with the Scots influence on the American Revolution full of characters and events that were key elements in David McCullough's "John Adams" and I found the author's style very similar to McCullough's - a positive endorsement in my opinion since I find McCullough the absolute best of modern historical biographers!

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Summary: Certainly doesn't understate the influence of Scots
Review: I'm not sure how Scottish "Ulster Scots" are or Scots from Australia, but this book rightly points out that people of Scottish descent have made significant contributions to modern civilization that are well beyond the size of Scotland.

Most interesting for me in this book was discussion of the "Scottish Enlightenment", highlighting people such as Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith and others. People who use Smith to justify unimpeded laissez faire "survival of the fittest" philosophies would be well served by seeing Smith in his proper perspective.

On some fronts, I didn't know whether some claims were accurate such as the southern term for "rednecks" and others. But on whole, I enjoyed the book and it has made me want to read additional information on Scotland.

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Summary: Get Scotland's Empire instead!
Review: What a load of reductive cr*p! Buy Get Scotland's Empire by T. M. Devine instead!

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Summary: Good summary of the Scottish Enlightenment and its results.
Review: Despite its annoying title, "How the Scots Invented the Modern World" is an enjoyable book and a good summary of the Scottish Enlightenment. Its author, Arthur Herman, doesn't make the case that the Scotch "invented the modern world" any more than several other nations can claim to have "invented the modern world," but Herman also doesn't truly attempt to argue such a case either, to his credit. Instead, he gives a good summary of Scotland's history and the contributions that many Scotch and people of Scottish descent have made to human progress.

At the beginning of the book, Herman gives a quick but sufficient summary of Scotland's pre-Enlightenment history, focusing primarily on its union with England to form Great Britain in 1707 and the Jacobite revolt of 1745, the unsuccessful attempt by France, in cooperation with Highland Scots, to restore the Stuart dynasty to the English throne. With the solidification of the British union after the "Forty-five," Scotland truly began to make its monumental contributions to science, economics, medicine, philosophy, commerce, and numerous other fields at the foundation of modern Western culture.

One area where Herman should have expanded his focus is on the extent that Scottish Presbyterianism laid the groundwork for the Scottish Enlightenment. While Herman does note that the Enlightenment in Scotland differed from the Enlightenment in France in that the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment saw progress and Christianity as completely compatible, if not necessary, he fails to look at why the Calvinist philosophy prevalent in 18th Century Scotland (and therefore, much of 18th Century North America) would encourage an environment so friendly to human progress. Despite what Herman seems to believe, the Scottish Enlightenment did not happen in spite of the Calvinist Presbyterian culture from which it came but largely because of it.

In the final chapters of his book, Herman tells the stories of 19th Century Scotch migrations to America, Australia, India, Africa, and several other areas where the Scottish Enlightenment would leave its imprint. It's in these chapters that the book's title seems less the obvious exaggeration that it is. Thanks to these migrations, the teachings and discoveries of Adam Smith, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson and the other notables of the Scottish Enlightenment eventually did have a monumental impact on many of the most powerful nations in the world today.

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Summary: A history which crosses academic boundaries.
Review: While Herman is faithful to his theme, too faithful as I will explain, I view his work as a really fine history book, one written across academic boundaries: it covers the political, economic, social, intellectual, literary and architectural history of Scotland, focusing on the 18th century. It is written largely in terms of personalities; while at times the reader may get overwhelmed by a parade of characters, this is relatively infrequent. Instead, Herman always focuses on those elements of a person's background and accomplishment which reflect his society and contributed to it. Edinburgh in the 18th century reminds one of Athens in the 5th century BC., with all these intellectual greats knowing each other well, and all benefiting from and creating new ways of looking at the world. Sometime in the 19th century, Scotland went into decline. While Herman is very talented at briefly capturing the essence of social or economic changes, he has very little to say about the causes of this decline: it is almost as if it does not square with his themes. In the beginning of the book, Herman left my head swimming with his too short a discussion of earlier Scotch history, but maybe he assumed more knowledge on the reader's part than I had. In any event, after using the term Jacobite numerous times, he finally explains it on p.114 (hint, it has nothing to do with the Jacobins of the French revolution).