How The Scots Invented the Modern World

Historian Arthur Herman argues that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Scotland, Western Europe's poorest nation, shaped modern politics, commerce, medicine, philosophy and science. The first part, Epiphany, traces the Scottish Enlightenment to the literacy and democratic ideas spread by John Knox and the Church of Scotland, and profiles figures such as Francis Hutcheson, Lord Kames, Robert Adam and Adam Smith. The second part, Diaspora, follows Scots abroad, including their influence on the American Revolution and Constitution and their role on the American frontier and in the British Empire. Critics judged the thesis overreaching while granting that the Scots had an outsized impact on modernity.

Charlie Munger noted that it traces the first literate society, the first modern nation and the roots of democracy and free markets back to the Scots.