| How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It | 
 enlarge | Author: Arthur Herman
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  83 reviews
Sales Rank: 4513
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0609809997
Dewey Decimal Number: 941.1
EAN: 9780609809990
ASIN: 0609809997
Publication Date: September 24, 2002
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Condition: Trade Paperback. / Three Rivers Press: 24 September, 2002; 472 pp / Condition: Very good condition., Stock#: 783265 (60-D) * * WE SHIP NEXT BUSINESS DAY * *
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| Customer Reviews:
 Not worth the effort July 21, 2005
23 out of 37 found this review helpful
As someone with Scottish heritage, and a professional historian (of the U.S., not Scotland), I was initially enthusiastic about reading this book. I was soon disappointed. For a popular work, this is pretty dull reading (and this comes from someone who reads academic prose for a living). The lack of footnotes is also troubling. But what most bothers me is that this book not only damns the Scots with faint praise (as other reviewers have observed), it also is a not too subtle dig at multiculturalism (which he periodically picks out throughout the book). The conclusion -- that the Scots have no claims to a pan-Celtic heritage that condemns English imperialism -- is especially heavy handed and unconvincing. The fact that one of the author's other major works is an equally problematic apology for Senator Joseph McCarthy casts even more suspicion on the author's methodology and possible bias. Don't waste your time or money.
Brilliant viewpoints! May 10, 2005
17 out of 42 found this review helpful
Why of course the Chinese government was entirely to blame for the opium imported by the Scotsmen Jardine and Matheson! It just like when Americans have a cocaine problem, it is the US government, and not the drug smugglers and dealers, that has the responsibility. And if the Chinese folks got addicted to this narcotic, well, it's for their own good you know. At least that's Herman's view. Also, the Scots who thus created Hong Kong for the opium trade did not do all this hard work for money or for themselves. Yes, they did make a little money but that's not why they were in China. They imported opium in order to create Hong Kong so that one day it will become a "premier" commercial city of the Orient, with the ultimate goal of teaching China western financial and economic techniques. If it were not for Jardine and Matheson, how could China have become a great power today, or a candidate superpower tomorrow? No, these two far-sighted Scots had this noble, lofty goal in mind when they came to China, nothing lesss. When historians condemn these two for their "crime" (drug-dealing, that is) they forget that they are actually heroes, as Herman sees so clearly and correctly. And so it is completely unjust that a brilliant people like the Scots don't even have a country they can call their own while the "barbaric" and "decadent" Chinese do.
 How the Scots Sold Out and Invented the Modern World April 5, 2005
8 out of 23 found this review helpful
(I have not read all of the reviews of this volume, so I apologize if I repeat what others have said.)
I am not a historian and am unable to judge the accuracy of the factual claims made in Herman's book. However, I do note a certain lack of objectivity, reflected in the title of this book, which has led me to strongly dislike a book I had expected to find both illuminating and enjoyable.
Basically, Herman tells the story about how the Scots gave up their independence, their culture, their language and their way of life in order to assimilate to the superior culture of the English and succeeded, for a time, in outdoing those they had decided to imitate. Without a government of their own and largely ignored by the English parliament, the Scots, left to their own devices, produced the first full-blown secular, Capitalist market society. In other words, the Scots sold their souls for a mess of pottage, a pattern that, at least as far as economics go, has been reduplicated throughout the rest of the "civilized" world down to our own times.
The Scottish "Enlightenment" was the product of Scottish insularity as much as anything else. Hucheson and Hume, Kames and Reid could assume that the basic principles of morals and human knowledge were universally available to "common sense" because they were largely unaware of (and to the extent they were aware, did not take seriously) the empirical differences across cultures with regard to morals and epistemology. Adam Smith could discover the universal "laws" of economic behavior by regarding the unique commercial practices of his own society as the culmination of one branch of the "natural history" of human progress. As someone said (I believe it was Hazlett) "The Wealth of Nations tells the story of how man began as a savage, but by degrees raised himself, and became a Scotchman."
Whether you think this is a fine legacy or not depends on your point of view; Herman clearly has his. Not everyone, I think, will agree.
Good Summary March 14, 2005
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
This book is a great summary of events particularly of those events dealing with the Scottish side of the Enlightenment. Philosophizing is fine but where the Scots came in is taking the quizzical nature of the Enlightenment and applying it to practical pursuits like science, medicine and even the beginnings of modern economics (Adam Smith, who's father was a customs officer oddly enough). The author also does his best expunge some of the popular myths of Scottish history including the cases for the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745.
Overall-I loved the book but in some ways it got a little repetitive something akin to reading "How the Irish saved Civilization". The Scots did a lot of great things but eventually the book has the reader believing that they did everything. Eventually I began to wonder if Mr. Herman was going to give the Scottish people credit for inventing the wheel.
Trendy Tartan Tutorial March 1, 2005
20 out of 39 found this review helpful
I've seen this kind of narrow, linear dissertation too often before, most conspicuous in James Burke's tedious "Connections" via the BBC and PBS, the godfather of obscurity. I opened Herman with equal optimism and closed it with near identical despair for coherent objectivity, a horse that won't run probably of the Trojan variety.
In charting sequential historical underpinnings one must accept (reluctantly by some) the detached framework laid down by both linear and lateral catalysts and triggers. Herman's treatise strongly reminds me of one seizing upon a single thread protruding from a sweater, then unraveling the garment from its midsection irrespective of sleeves, collar or hem which in fact denote its termini. His historical framework is built inward upon itself not unlike an M.C. Escher etching with no discernible beginning or end, the whole teetering on a driven need for preeminent firsts.
I need not dwell on its nuts and bolts because the framework these attach is fundamentally flawed. Strange though that many of these frequently Anglo-Scots increments exclude parallel if not surpassing contemporary equivalents--largely English and French--in this quest to amplify all achievements Scottish. In his prologue and elsewhere Herman ventures the ultimate overstatement--"In fact, the very notion of `human history' is itself...a largely Scottish invention." Poor Herodotus. Genius knows no nationality.
The result is advocacy rather than insight. He argues reasonably well but does not convince, this despite my own personal affinity for the Scots. Before writing he should have read Charles Freeman's "The Greek Achievement: The Foundation of the Western World" (Penguin, 1999). It would have confined him to chronicling the admittedly valuable admixture of the Scottish Enlightenment without resorting to hyperbolous claims. To use his own catch phrase, the creation of "our world and everything in it"--science, arts, government, philosophy, humanities--are inescapably the seminal purview of the Ionian, Athenian, and Spartan Greeks, self-evident for generations. The term "pop revisionist" looms.
In his "Bonfire of the Humanities" Victor Davis Hanson rightly railed against this attractive latter-day urge to embark upon a historical survey from midstream irrespective of classical foundations, which invariably begets preconception and skewed personal bias. Every hypothesis has at least one assumption, but recorded history is by definition anti-hypothetical and frequently thereby damaged. The demise of classical education, coupled to concurrent abandonment of the languages which record early foundations of human knowledge, represent a form of radical, self-inflicted brain surgery. Herein lies the root of the "dumbing-down" process so in evidence today.
Herman is just another pop history storyteller. Opinion and cleverness (as well marketing) substitute for intelligent insight grounded in hard-won structured knowledge. His bibliography is weak and grossly skewed. If one ventures into a grocery store looking for a can of peas, he will invariably find a can of peas. If, on the other hand, he enters planning a full-course meal his mind and imagination remain open to all options. Herman prefers Scottish-grown peas precariously balanced on a sharp dirk.
Herman's premise was flawed from the start. He seeks to elevate Scots to the significance of seminal groundbreakers irrespective of preceding Greek and Roman achievements, the Renaissance, Dutch dissemination of inquiring free thought through vigorous free world trade, the incipient French Enlightenment, as well English and parallel Celtic efforts with which were made concurrent forward strides toward what we call the modern Western world. Entrepreneurship of the Scottish diaspora didn't function within a vacuum. To suggest that it did, by either omission or deliberate exclusion, is deeply counter-intuitive. Myopia can be corrected with glasses; this book cannot, tartan blindness actually. Where pedestals are built the pyramid of human knowledge becomes flattened.
It's logical that this fellow found a home at the Smithsonian, birds of a feather down to the Indiana Jones fedora, pop history for pop culture and, I might add, pop careers. Publish or perish. This one ranks right up there with "America B.C." and "Black Athena." Novelty is quick and profitable, hopefully with a dash of controversy to season the stew. Structured knowledge is time consuming, even painful, rarely monetarily rewarding but of infinite value to future generations. Anything else is intentionally disposable literature, fleeting entertainment. I have to agree (and chuckle) with an Amazon reviewer who branded it "reductive cr*p." Buchan's "Crowded With Genius" appears no better.
The man most singularly responsible for propelling us into a truly "modern" Western world (perhaps a post-modernist one) was in fact Italian--Guglielmo Marconi, representative of yet another impoverished nation long dominated from without. There's irony for you. He too was beset by envious intellectual thieves ill at ease with their own mediocrity.
"The first law for the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice."
--Marcus Tullius Cicero
My advice: Caveat emptor.
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