David Hume and Adam Smith are just two of the significant Scottish thinkers of this era. The Scottish Enlightenment was more practical and aligned with common sense than was the Enlightenment of the French philosophes. This led to a rise in prosperity and helped set in motion various influences of modernization.Ī lively intellectual life in the burgeoning cities of the Scottish lowlands put Scotland at the forefront of the 18 th century enlightenment. An Act of Union between the two kingdoms was approved in 1707. This led to a willingness on the part of the Scottish elite to surrender their independence in return for the chance to participate in commerce on the same terms as the English and under the protection of the Royal Navy. It failed, for various reasons, which was an economic disaster for the country. A huge fraction of the wealth of Scotland was invested in this venture. Scotland tried to found her own colony, called Darien, on the coast of the Isthmus of Panama. Other nations of Western Europe in the 1600’s had colonies in the Americas, which seemed to be a source of national wealth and influence. Scottish trade and industry were constricted by the policies of England, their more powerful neighbor to the south. The 1690’s were an unusually cold decade, leading to famine and poverty in the more northern European countries like Scotland. The subtitle on the front jacket of the book expansively portrays its contents as: “The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It”.Ī key event which helped launch this flowering was an economic one.

By 1800, it was an economically thriving section of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, and a huge contributor to modern thought on many levels. In much of the country, clansmen in their kilts constantly robbed and fought each other.

Scotland in 1700 was a small, poor, largely agrarian independent nation, still characterized in large part by feudalism. This book describes the development of intellectual life and related events in Scotland from about 1700 onward.

How scotland invented the modern world