Herman is an American person and as a Scot I am happy to have him tell the truth about the modern world 'that it was invented by the Scots! Tobacco Lords’ success lay in their balance sheets: their ability to summon up capital from a wide variety of sources, while ruthlessly cutting costs. Ships meant shipbuilding and many Scots later brought their talents to the New World resulting in the speedy clipper ships. Paterson later tried (unsuccessfully) to create an independent Scottish Empire with a grand navy to rival the English. 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.

The values of Eton, Cambridge, and Oxford, of the Reform and Athenaeum clubs, and of Lord’s Cricket Grounds steadily replaced those of a grittier homegrown variety. Here is the untold story of how John Knox and the Church of Scotland laid the foundation for our modern idea of democracy; how the Scottish Enlightenment helped to inspire both the American Revolution and the U. They smashed stained-glass windows and saints' statues, ripped out choir stalls and roodscreens, and overturned altars. Knox and Buchanan believed that political power was ordained by God, but that that power was vested not in kings or in nobles or even in the clergy, but in the people. But as historian and author Arthur Herman demonstrates, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Scotland earned the respect of the rest of the world for its crucial contributions to science, philosophy, literature, education, medicine, commerce, and politics—contributions that have formed and nurtured the modern West ever since.

Over the next century, Scots would learn to rely on their own resources and ingenuity far more than their southern neighbors would.

S. Constitution; and how thousands of Scottish immigrants left their homes to create the American frontier, the Australian outback, and the British Empire in India and Hong Kong.In the span of a single generation it would transform Scotland from a Third World country into a modern society and open up a cultural and social revolution," Herman asserts. Scotland’s upper and middle classes were losing that hard-driving entrepreneurial edge which had been a part of their cultural heritage.