How the Scots Invented the Modern World

Arthur Herman makes a bold claim: that many of the ideas we think of as modern were shaped in eighteenth-century Scotland. He traces how a small, once-poor country produced thinkers like Adam Smith and David Hume, and how Scottish notions of free markets, education, and practical improvement spread across the world through emigration and empire. The book is a lively work of intellectual history built around an unlikely engine of progress.