How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It
"I am a Scotsman," Sir Walter Scott famously wrote, "therefore I had to  fight my way into the world." So did any number of his compatriots over a period  of just a few centuries, leaving their native country and traveling to every  continent, carving out livelihoods and bringing ideas of freedom, self-reliance,  moral discipline, and technological mastery with them, among other key  assumptions of what historian Arthur Herman calls the "Scottish mentality."It is only natural, Herman suggests, that a country that once ranked among  Europe's poorest, if most literate, would prize the ideal of progress, measured  "by how far we have come from where we once were." Forged in the Scottish  Enlightenment, that ideal would inform the political theories of Francis  Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and David Hume, and other Scottish thinkers who viewed  "man as a product of history," and whose collective enterprise involved "nothing  less than a massive reordering of human knowledge" (yielding, among other  things, theEncyclopaedia Britannica,first published in Edinburgh in  1768, and the Declaration of Independence, published in Philadelphia just a few  years later). On a more immediately practical front, but no less bound to that  notion of progress, Scotland also fielded inventors, warriors, administrators,  and diplomats such as Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie, Simon MacTavish,  and Charles James Napier, who created empires and great fortunes, extending  Scotland's reach into every corner of the world.Herman examines the lives and work of these and many more eminent Scots, capably  defending his thesis and arguing, with both skill and good cheer, that the Scots  "have by and large made the world a better place rather than a worse place."--Gregory McNamee