A difficult but worthwhile read. It examines the characteristics of Scottish history which endure to this day in our european/American society. Every person of Scottish extraction should read it and be proud. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

I loved all the fun facts. Entertaining and educational read. ( )