More than Scotch Came from Scotland...
Cristina Tanase reviews Arthur Herman's How the Scots Invented the Modern World
It is either about making a phone call, getting to the most remote islands by the modern successor of Orvile and Wilbur Wright’s plane, reading a James Bond novel or a ‘Daily’ tabloid newspaper, drinking Lipton tea or having a Johnny Walker whisky. In all these there is as much Scottish influence as it is in Adam Smith’s, David Hume’s or Francis Hutchenson’s writings.
How the Scots Invented the Modern World is historian Arthur Herman’s testimony in support of that Scottish spirit that led to some of the most amazing discoveries of the ‘modern world’. When one reads ‘discoveries’, he/she should not only think of the material/scientific ones, but also of those sets of ideas on economics, political philosophy, education, literature, architecture. In each of these categories, Herman says, we can nominate at least one Scottish leader.
The funny part of the book is that it gives us a flavor of the old Scottish language, by comparing some words with their English counterparts. Thus, craik stands for ‘talk’, nekkid for ‘naked’, critter for ‘creature’.
Herman links a chain of historic events into a smooth, captivating story that does not simply tell, but explains causes and effects, analyses good points and bad points, debates pros and cons. The book is divided into two parts, the first handling the Scottish development from the 16th to the late 18th century, the second completing the portrait of the Scottish Diaspora and its underlying contribution to the development of the Birtish colonies of United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and even Africa.
Religion, education, economics and law played important roles in the Scottish people’s progress. Scotland was, the author says, Europe’s first modern literate society. By 1696, every parish was supposed to have a school and a teacher, according to the provisions of Parliament’s “Act for Setting Schools”. The act had important effects on commerce: it contributed to the flourishing of book trade, paper making, bookselling and printing.
Abandoning the Catholic Church, Presbyterian Scotland and Episcopalian England had to share a common history, as their close geography could not be changed.
The Act of Union (1707) united England and Scotland into Great Britain, governed by a single monarch and a single British Parliament. It is this, the author says, that actually spurred Scotland’s economic growth, moving its economy away from a “Third World country” stage to that of a “modern society”. It is this that made the Scots innovate and use the advantages of laissez-faire private sector into a Union that rendered English-style public order, enforced law and a standing army and navy. The price of this economic boom was the loss of political autonomy, the author explains.
This was exactly the perfect moment for the Scottish Enlightenment to make herself conspicuous, showing its scientific side and concern for mathematics, medicine, law, natural philosophy. The concepts of liberty, free society, rights and obligations became popular within the theories of Pufendorf, Hutchenson and Shaftsbury. The term liberty was especially associated with refined tastes, sophistication, and even politeness.
During the 18th century, we find an innovative, industrial and mercantile Glasgow and an artistic and literary Edinburgh leading the intellectual trend of the Scottish society. At the same time, we find Edinburgh jammed, blackened, and totally lacking sanitation. The reader will find Daniel Defoe’s description of the city interesting.
Arthur Herman also tackles the problem of the Scottish cultural identity, bound to its English side. He says the two nations are distinct in political, as well as cultural terms. Yet, as Herman beautifully explains, although Scots became English speakers and culture bearers, they stuck to their Scottish roots.
What you get out of this book is an understanding of the true Scots’ spirit; concepts like commercial society, monopoly, means of production, no longer seem created solely as flamboyant explanations by self-interested entrepreneurs. Instead, they become alive and more humane with the author’s excellent effort to bind them to those things that created them: liberty, refinement, progress of the human spirit and commerce.
Personalities like Adam Smith and David Hume receive a whole sub-chapter in Arthur Herman’s book. The historian thoroughly examines their theories and, adopting a fairly balanced tone, emphasizes the innovations in their theories. The author’s balance is evident when, after having extolled concepts like Smith’s division of labour, he also points out the Scottish thinker’s worries about other effects of capitalism: corruption and cultural costs.
In the second part of his book, Herman shows how Scottish personalities like James Watt, Charles Darwin, David Livingstone, Samuel Finley Breese Morse, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson influenced the rest of the world. This influence is a blend of values, judgments and education received by the Scottish leaders, a blend that Herman says refers to what we are tempted to call the ‘American cultural type’ but which in fact is of Scottish origin. This part is also a short history of the Scots’ colonization of North America, Australia – a former British penal colony – and New Zealand.
Following the Scottish example of education, colonists in North America – of which many were, in fact, Scottish-born – developed a humanistic curriculum comprising the study of ancient as well as modern political thinkers. No wonder that this system based on the principles of free society firmly stood against Parliament’s efforts to tax and regulate internal affairs, the author says. No wonder that the feelings that animated the spirit of the American Revolution first originated in this Scottish-like prototype, characterised by “an independent intellect combined with an assertive self-respect, and grounded by a strong sense of moral purpose” and vigorously promoting the free exchange of ideas.
Literature stands as another example of Scottish cultural representation. What Walter Scott created by his Rob Roy and Guy Mannering was, according to Herman, an identity highly perceived as ‘national’ and ‘characteristic’ for the Scots: the myth of the noble Highlander attired in kilts, bonnets, tartans, bagpipes and singing Gaelic battle songs.
The author uses two interesting terms in this section. The first, brain-drain, has exactly the same meaning as today, but importantly its advantages were already self-evident in the 19th century. The second, liberal imperialism, points to the spreading of the liberal philosophy across the world. In the author’s view, this kind of imperialism has good connotations, because it imposes “better schools, more just laws, more prosperous towns and cities, more money in ordinary people’s pockets and more food on their tables.”
The danger in this phrase lies in the word “better”, as good is hard to define in, let’s say, an Islamic or Buddhist society. It was a positive good that Charles James Napier succeeded in India: economic, as well as religious reforms – the banning of ‘suttee’ (a widow is burned on a funeral pyre after her husband’s death); however, according to the Brahmin priests, this kind of good faced allegations of ‘interfering with an important national custom’.
Arthur Herman’s book is intellectually challenging. The reader need not remember figures, as the important ones will speak for themselves. What he will get, instead, is a flow of occurrences that will naturally be borne in his mind and will explain the ‘why’ and ‘how’. Additionally, he will cast a thorough glance on how great Scottish intellects intertwined to give birth to, as the author says, “the true story of how Western Europe’s poorest nation created our world and everything in it”.
Cristina Tanase is a journalist from Romania, now living in Spain, and attended the 2005 Institute for Economic Studies-Europe Seminar in Varna, Bulgaria.
Fiction Reading Suggestions...
A few great novels about liberalism, freedom and enterprise: North and Southby Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruined City by Nevil Shute, Malafrena by Ursula LeGuin, and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
Gaskell (1810-1865) wrote a number of novels that examined social issues and some deeply critical of industrialization in England. But her novel North and South, originally serialized by Dickens, compared the rural and aristocratic south of England with the rapidly industrializing north. It is a great, great book. It was originally recommended to me by Ruth Fay as an antidote to the anti-capitalism in so much of Dickens' novels. Gaskell shows all sides sympathetically but makes clear that the higher productivity of manufacturing benefits the working class. Workers become less deferential to aristocrats as they become better fed and more independent. Aristocrats, naturally, don't much like that. Former peasants look them right in the eye instead of gazing downward.North and South gives us a glimpse of the vast spirit of enterprise as cities like Manchester were industrializing. Lots of pollution, but pollution was a by-product of stunning gains in productivity, and a stunning fall in the price of cloth and clothing, as new machines could make in hours what past hand looms took days and weeks to produce. The businessman hero of North and South decides, after building a successful enterprise, to get the education he never could afford or have time for as a young man. He hires a retired minister from the south of England to tutor him. As he learns though evening discussions, he also gets involved in discussions on social issues and economics with the minister's daughter. She is none too pleased to have had to move from her quiet rural life in the south of England to the rude, free-wheeling, seemingly chaotic busyness of the industrializing north.
Ruined City by Nevil Shute
One of Nevil Shute's terrific novels on business. During the recession following World War I, a financier finds himself in the hospital of a depressed English manufacturing town. The economic collapse hit the ship building industry especially hard and this town's ship yards were empty as its hospial was full of men without jobs or hope. People wwere trying to survive (without industry, Shute writes, the town's air is "as clean as a sepulcher.") The financier decides to buy the shipyard and try to finance new orders to restart the town. But in trying to secure foreign orders he engages in foreign business practices (bribes...), and then questionable manipulations to float an initial stock offering to fund construction. Some of Nevil Shute's business novels have come back into print recently (2010). Highly recommended, and with market theme (in part of the book) is A Town Like Alice. Still out of print but available used: The Far Country,Malefrena...Throughout Europe, Stretched the Silent Network of Liberalism...stories for a Starting Place
I was reminded how I got started in the world of classical liberal ideas when a used book ordered on Amazon arrived. I started re-reading it and was again swept away.
In middle school I read The Lord of the Rings from start to finish each summer. It was a grand landscape of great adventure with higher meanings I didn't understand. But like Homer's Odyssey it was an adventure where boys (young Hobbits actually) were transformed through experiences into men (still hobbits, but tougher ones). I was a boy and becoming a man and I guess wondered what orcs and goblins might appear in my path to fight or outwit.
I read mostly science fiction in those years, having slowly graduated from Marvel comic books. Wandering the house one evening, I asked my mother for more science fiction. She suggested Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read it quickly, wondering first about the amazing engine said to draw vast power from the Earth’s electricity. There was much more in Atlas Shrugged, but at 16 or 17, the bad guys and economic conflict were as alien to me as monsters in science fiction. Tolkien dreamed a world of orcs and goblins by nature evil and elves by nature good. Men's souls could be molded to live good lives or be seduced by evil. In Ayn Rand's world men could become just as evil and just as bent on destroying all that was good in the world. It didn’t seem real to me at the time (and became real only in college where I met people who claimed to believe the same anti-life philosophies I knew from Atlas Shrugged). Atlas Shrugged planted seeds of an alternate world here on Earth where strong and silent people could oppose bad ideas and destructive policies.
I read most of the science fiction books by Ursula K. Leguin. Her Earthsea Trilogy was captivating, as were others of her early anthopology-based science fiction novels. In 1980 a new book appeared titled Malafrena. When I put this book down I knew what I wanted to do, though had no idea how to do it.
Malafrena sounded like a mystical place and I assumed the novel would be science fiction or fantasy. Sinking deeper into the story, I kept expected a door to open to another world, or a ancient power to appear. After a time I walked through that door and was immersed in another world. I stepped into the past, into the fierce and confusing struggle for freedom waged in Central Europe thirty years after the French Revolution. (I heard an historian say recently that "the past is like another country." So maybe the past in another country can be like another world.)
Itale Sorde grew up in the provinces learning to manage his father’s estate, but surrounded by his grandfather’s books. At seventeen, home from boarding school, he happens one evening to begin reading through old French newspapers his grandfather had saved, turning to the year 1790. LeGuin writes: “He held the French Revolution in his hands. He read the speech in which the orator called down the wrath of the people on the house of privilege, the speech that ended, “Vivro libre, ou mourir!”-- Live free, or die. The yellow newsprint crumbled under the boy’s touch; his head was bowed over dry columns of words spoken to a lost Assembly by men over thirty years dead…
“The speeches were full of rant, cant, and vanity; he saw that clearly enough. But they discussed freedom as a human need, like bread, like water. Itale got up and walked up and down the quiet little library, rubbing his head and staring blankly at the bookcases and the windows. Freedom was not a necessity, it was a danger, all the lawmakers of Europe had been saying that for a decade. Men were children, to be governed for their own good by the few who understood the science of government. What did this Frenchman Vergniaud mean by stating a choice--live free or die? Such choices are not offered to children. The words were spoken to men. They rang bald and strange; they lacked the logic of statements made in support of alliances, counter-alliances, censorships, repressions, reprisals…”
Itale then goes off, in September of 1822, to attend college in the provincial capital. In college he meets others and joins Amiktiya, a secret society, “The drank a lot of wine… passed contraband books around, discussed revolutions in France, Naples, Piedmont, Spain, Greece, talked of constitutional monarchy, equality before the law, popular education, a free press, all without any clear idea of what they were getting at, where it all led. They were not supposed to talk, so they talked.” (p. 16)
A dinner conversation is described with Itale and his father and uncle discussing the coming meeting of Estates, the first in thirty years. The uncle hopes for local control at least of taxes, “They might be able to do something about taxation at least. The Hungarian Diet’s won back control over their taxes from Vienna.” But Itale’s father answers “What if they did? Taxes won’t be decreased. Taxes are never decreased.” Itale replies “The money wouldn’t go to support a foreign police force, at any rate."
After college, it is time for Itale to return to his home in Malafrena. But instead he talks with his friends of going to Krasnoy, the capital, to fight, somehow, for freedom. “There must be men in the city who would welcome them and put them to work. There were said to be secret societies there, which corresponded with similar groups in Piedmont and Lombardy, Naples, Bohemia, Poland, German states: for through the territories and satellites of the Austrian Empire and even beyond, throughout Europe, stretched the silent network of liberalism, like the nervous system of a sleeping man. A restless sleep, feverish, full of dreams. … Itale went striding down the shady street like a summer whirlwind, his face hot, his coat open.” (p. 7). (from Malafrena by Ursula K. LeGuin).
Malafrena is not about free-markets or libertarian ideas. As I recall LeGuin gives glimpses of horrific early industrialization and abuse of workers. Things were pretty terrible in the beginning of the industrial period for a lot of people. But they were better than available alternatives, including life on the farm. Otherwise people would have left industrial jobs and moved back to the countryside to work for their old aristocratic masters. Or at least thousands then streaming into cities throughout Europe--as they do in the underdeveloped world today--would have stayed home.
(Early industrialization in Europe, following the destruction of the Napoleonic Wars, was especially dark. England had gone deeply in debt to pay for the war. All that wealth was destroyed and impoverished workers were taxed heavily to pay the debts. So things did get worse for many, but not because capitalism was somehow less productive or distribution less fair.)
I read Malafrena in a fever similar to Itale Sorde's described above, and wished as well to leave the provinces and join the fight for (classical) liberalism. I attended an Institute for Humane Studies seminar that summer and visited the Cato Institute (as close as we had to secret societies in the 1980s) looking for an internship position. Instead I joined the Institute for Humane Studies and assisted with their Liberty and Society seminars and directed an program for high school speech and debate students.
So now, many years later, I am rereading the book that first got me thinking about joining “the movement." And when students from this summer's IES-Europe Seminars write to ask about classical liberal ideas and internships (with today's "secret societies"), I write them to recommend Malafrena, North and South, and Atlas Shrugged.
--Greg Rehmke
Non-fiction recommendations...
Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation by David A. Price
