How the Scots Invented the Modern World

by Arthur Herman

  In the final analysis, we find in Lord Kames and his writings the Scottish mind geared entirely toward the practical and the concrete, shorn of any sentimentality or pretense but also of any compassion. Religious feeling, too, got short shrift from Kames. Divine Providence increasingly disappeared from his analysis of man as a moral or social animal. When mortal illness finally overtook him, at age eighty-six, he greeted it stoically with his usual lack of sentimentality. His last day on the bench, he said merely good-bye to his colleagues with a jocular “Fare ye weel, ye bitches!”

  James Boswell came up from London to visit him at home a month or so later, shortly before Christmas in 1782. He was shocked, and a little disappointed, to see that the approach of death had failed to lift his old mentor’s thoughts beyond the mundane and trivial. There were no last words of wisdom, insight, or even regret. Nothing.

  Boswell, who was a professing Christian and a believer in an afterlife, tried to corner the old man about his views on the subject. “I believe, my Lord,” he said, “you have been lucky enough to have always an amiable view of the Deity, and no doubt of a future state.”

  Kames, sitting in his armchair, said nothing. Boswell confessed he believed the doctrine of an eternity of Hell’s torment was counterproductive. “No,” Kames replied, “nobody believes it.”

  Six days later he was dead.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Land Divided

  The Highlanders are Great Thieves.

  —Cassius Dio, Roman historian, Third Century A.D.

  Twenty thousand years ago, the last great ice age buried the northern half of Europe under a massive glacier. In some places, the Eurasian ice sheet was as much as one mile thick; it acted as a primordial bulldozer, relentlessly shoving aside everything in its path. It did its most destructive work in Scandinavia and northern Britain, grinding the earth’s surface down to the bare rock. When the huge ice plate finally melted and receded, it left behind a pitiless landscape of granite mountains and deep, gouged-out river valleys—the landscape of the Scottish Highlands. Only a thin, provisional crust of topsoil covered the harsh, flinty ground. It is the poorest land in Britain.

  Nonetheless, over the next millennia it would become home to a succession of peoples. First, pre-Celtic Neolithic tribesmen; then the Picts, who battled the Romans along Hadrian’s Wall for control of northern Britain; and then, finally, wanderers from Ireland whom the Romans termed Scoti (or “bandits”) but who called themselves the Gael. Celtic by language and culture, the Gaels congregated in extended family groupings—the ancestors of the clans. By the middle of the eighteenth century there were more than 600,000 people living in this wild, inaccessible region. The agriculture produced by that poor layer of topsoil could barely support half that number.

  By 1745 the Highlands were on the brink of starvation. Political events far beyond the mountains and glens were about to set off a massive upheaval, as the news spread south that the clans were on the move.

  I

  To an observant Scot in the 1730s and 1740s, Lord Kames’s four-stage theory of social evolution was more than a theory; it was a part of everyday reality. Looking around him, he could see all four stages in action at once.

  For example, Glasgow and Edinburgh were beginning to exhibit all the characteristics of “polite” commercial society. The fertile river valleys in the middle Lowlands, from Ayrshire and Lanarkshire in the Clyde Valley across the Lothians to Berwick and Roxburgh, fit the agrarian stage, as lairds and tenants labored as they always had to produce the annual harvest. In fact, the Scottish version of “fixed” agriculture was anything but fixed: a prodigious wave of agricultural improvement was about to sweep over the Lowlands. One of the most enthusiastic improvers was Lord Kames himself. He constantly experimented on his family estate with new crops, crop rotation, and different manures and fertilizers—all in order to make his land more productive. Kames even dubbed agriculture “the chief of the arts,” and wrote an influential book on the subject. In it he admonished his fellow landlords and their tenants for their “stupid attachment to ancient habit and practices,” and pushed them to embrace the new. After the disastrous harvest of 1740, which triggered the last widespread famine in Scottish history, many were ready to follow his lead. Change was becoming the norm in Lowland Scotland, just as it is for us living in the modern global village: change for those living on the land, as well as those in the city.

  The Highlands, by contrast, seemed permanently stuck in the pastoral stage. Its inhabitants were herdsmen, living off their flocks of cattle and sheep, with farming coming in a poor second. The clan way of life fit perfectly Kames’s own description of the “shepherd life, in which societies are formed by the conjunction of families for mutual defense.” Once a source of strength, the clan system now increasingly isolated its members from the rest of Britain and Scotland.

  In 1600, Lowlanders and Highlanders would not have been strangers to each other. By 1700 they were. Even before the Act of Union, a series of changes had driven a wedge between the two halves of Scotland. Some were social and economic, as cities and the cash-based relations between laird and tenant uprooted the last remnants of clanship in the Lowlands. Some were religious, as the Lowlands embraced the Presbyterianism of John Knox, while the clansmen in the north tended to remain loyal to the Catholic faith or followed their chieftains into the Episcopalian Church. Others were linguistic, as Gaelic disappeared from the regions of Scotland south of the Firth of Forth but remained firmly rooted in the glens and Hebridean Islands to the north. But in every case, the next century would only deepen the split, which the events of 1745 would set in high relief.

  Then, if the observer turned to the Western Isles and the remotest parts of the north of Scotland, he might catch a glimpse of the most primitive of social stages, the hunter-gatherer stage. Tiny communities of fishermen and gatherers of seaweed and whelks dotted the Hebridean coast, eking out an existence from the rocky shoreline as they had for hundreds of years. Samuel Johnson saw them when he made his tour of the Hebrides with James Boswell in 1773, and noted the crude and pitiful huts in which they lived.

  A visit to the north made any Scot immune from the romantic myth of the “noble savage.” This was not a life of harmony with nature, as the disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau—or the modern radical environmentalist—might think. It was a world of dreary drudgery, inhabited by a people, Johnson observed, “whose whole time is a series of distress; where every morning is labouring with expedients for the evening; and where all mental pain or pleasure arose from the dread of winter, the expectation of spring, the caprices of their chiefs, and the motions of the neighboring clans.” No wonder he concluded, in one of his most famous maxims, that “the best prospect a Scotsman ever sees is the high road to London.”

  London, perhaps, but more likely Glasgow or Edinburgh. If hunting-gathering and pastoral-nomadic Scotland chained people to a life of destitution and ignorance, commercial Scotland opened them up to the rest of the world, and the rest of Britain. In 1740, Glasgow’s great Tobacco Lords were just coming into their own, and the wealth from their American trade was about to transform the face of the city. The teeming warehouses and counting-houses along Glasgow’s business district not only looked westward over the Atlantic but also south and east, as Glasgow merchants re-exported their American tobacco cargoes to ports in France, Scandinavia, and Russia, as well as the Mediterranean.10

  But it was Edinburgh that first exhibited the key advantages of life in a commercial, modern society. In 1740 it was still a small town compared with London or even Bristol. Citizens rich and poor still lived in the dank narrow alleys and wynds of the Old Town, now packed to overflowing. But the city breathed an energy and cultural vitality that every observer noted immediately. James Boswell described what it was like growing up in Edinburgh in the 1740s, with its unceasing bustle and social diversity, as he would race home after class down Horse Wynd and up Borthwick’s Close, past “advocates, writers, Scotch Hunters,
cloth-merchants, Presbyterian ministers, country lairds, captains both by land and sea, porters, chairmen, and cadies”—“cadies” being young men hired to do menial tasks (such as the one for which we still use the word, namely carrying golf clubs).

  Secular polite culture had arrived in Edinburgh, of a sort that a Lord Shaftesbury could recognize, and despite the occasional fierce opposition of local clergy. The sound that had symbolized the good life for the young Lord Kames—a harpsichord—had become part of everyday public life, thanks to the Crosskeys Tavern off Canongate. There, owner Patrick Steel, who was also a violin maker, sponsored regular concerts by talented amateur musicians. Lord Colville on the harpsichord, Forbes of Newhall on the viola da gamba, Steel himself on the violin, and Sir Gilbert Elliott of Minto on a new instrument from Germany, the transverse flute, drew flocks of admiring ladies. A little later the Edinburgh Musical Society would soon make the city Scotland’s music capital.

  More daringly, dancing also penetrated the Edinburgh scene. In 1710, Edinburgh had its first public ball. By the next decade Scotland’s leading aristocrats—Hamilton, Morton, Annandale, and Islay—could be seen dancing minuets, gavottes, and polonaises at parties or “assemblies” in private homes, much like their counterparts in London or Paris. The real breakthrough came in 1737, when ministers-in-training were allowed to learn to dance without fear of retribution, divine or otherwise. Alexander Carlyle, who was studying to be a minister at the university in the 1740s, took up dancing lessons with enthusiasm. As he confessed years later, he became quite good at it, “and had my choice of partners on all occasions.”

  Carlyle probably also perused Rules of Good Deportment, published in Edinburgh in 1720 by Adam Petrie. The Rules vividly demonstrated how “polite society” in Shaftesbury and Hutcheson’s sense required new standards of personal behavior. Petrie’s premise was that “civility is a pleasant Accomplishment” as well as “a Duty injoined by God.” He explained to his fellow Scots that gentlemen walk, rather than run, in the street. They don’t make faces or move their hands when they speak. They don’t prod people in the stomach to emphasize a point, and “when you discourse with another, stand not so near him as to breathe in his face.”

  Petrie also warned against making noises when you eat, or cramming your mouth with food, which is behavior, he explained, “more suitable to a Beast than a rational creature.” The polite diner does not lick his fingers at the table, or blow on his soup if it is too hot. Petrie concluded his advice on table manners by saying, “Do not smell at what you eat or drink, and it is most rude to do it to what another eats or drinks.”

  Edinburgh got its first daily newspaper in 1705. The Royal Bank of Scotland, the first such since the disastrous Darien failure, opened its doors in 1727, as did the Friendly Insurance Company and the Royal Infirmary. Scots Magazine published its first issue in 1739. It is still published today. Shops offering the physical accoutrements of polite manners—lace, gloves, linen underclothing, snuff, and gentleman’s powdered wigs—became part of Edinburgh commercial life, employing local men and women. Allan Ramsay, for example, was apprenticed to a wigmaker when he arrived in Edinburgh from his home in Lanarkshire. Once again, his education was a tribute to Scottish village schools. Although Ramsay was the son and stepson of day laborers, he learned enough Latin to read Horace “faintly in the original,” as he put it. Ramsay set up his own wigmaking shop in 1707, the same year as the Act of Union, but continued his voracious intellectual interests, poring over London publications such as Addison’s Spectator and Defoe’s Review. In 1727 he published his first poems, and then opened a bookstore in the Luckenbooths, beside St. Giles’s church.

  Ramsay understood, as other Scots soon would, that high culture could also be good business. To increase his customer base, he permitted patrons not only to buy the latest books but also to borrow them for a week or two, for a subscription fee. It was the first lending library in Britain, and soon people were following Ramsay’s example up and down Scotland. At first Ramsay ran afoul of the Kirk: clerics warned that he was allowing profane and sinful works to circulate in the city, and demanded that he be shut down. The day the town council sent inspectors to examine Ramsay’s bookshelves, however, they were amazed to discover them full of theological works and sermons. The city fathers decided to allow Ramsay to stay open.

  He did go too far, however, when he tried to open a theater, almost within sight of the John Knox House. The Kirk attacked Ramsay’s “Hellbred Playhouse Comedians who debauch all the Faculties of the Souls of our Rising Generation,” and the place had to be closed. It would be several more years before plays could be performed publicly in Edinburgh; people instead went to what were called “presentations,” usually in someone’s private home. But a corner had been turned in the battle against the old prohibitions and taboos, and the Kirk’s warning about “the Souls of our Rising Generation” shows that it knew the old Presbyterianism was losing its grip.

  Commercial Scotland had another significance in the 1740s. Glasgow and Edinburgh were where loyalty to the British union ran the deepest. They were “Whig” cities par excellence, meaning committed to ties to England and parliamentary rule from Westminster, as well as the new Hanoverian kings, a succession of German-born Georges with their English prime ministers. The first generation of Scottish Whigs, men such as Principal Carstares, had had to fight for union, and saw it primarily as a way to keep a Protestant on the throne. The next generation—men such as William Robertson, David Hume, Hugh Blair, John Home, and Alexander Carlyle—could take union for granted. Those self-professed disciples of Kames and Hutcheson saw their mission as securing Scotland’s rightful place as England’s equal in this United Kingdom. When Robertson composed his History of Scotland in 1759, he could boast that “the union having incorporated the two nations, and rendered them one people, the distinctions which had subsisted for many ages gradually wear away; peculiarities disappear; the same manners prevail in both parts of the island. . . .”

  One such distinction had been political. John Erskine of Grange, a jurist and leading Scottish Whig, noticed this as early as 1735. The end of independent Scotland, with its own Parliament and Privy Council, had not brought despotism and tyranny, as so many had feared. Just the opposite. “There is a wide difference,” Erskine noted, “between constitutional and effectual liberty.” In Scotland, he explained, “we had the first; but actual liberty was a stranger here.” Even the greatest aristocrats were not really free men, “for they were lawless, and with lawlessness freedom is inconsistent.” Thinking of figures such as William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, Erskine remarked, “the truth is our Scottish heroes of old savor a little of the Poles at present,” Poland being the eighteenth-century equivalent of constitutional anarchy. “They fought for liberty and independency, but not [for] the country, but [for] the Crown and the grandees.” Scots were beginning to realize that the passing of the old laws could be a matter of celebration rather than regret. In fact, that same year, 1735, saw the death penalty for witchcraft finally abolished.

  The other distinction between England and Scotland, and just as important in the minds of Robertson and others, had been cultural and literary. Whereas seventeenth-century Scotland had little or no great literature to set beside the achievements of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope, today, Robertson wrote, “the same standard of taste, and purity of language, is established” in both England and Scotland.

  “Purity of language”—this touched on a thorny issue in the eighteenth century, namely whether educated Scotsmen should adopt English, instead of Scots, as their primary written and spoken tongue. The social and cultural pressures for taking up English were intense. Everyone knew that England was the dominant partner in this new united kingdom. A Scotsman with drive and ambition measured his success by his success in England, and particularly in the English equivalent of the Big Apple, London. Succeeding there required learning to be and act English: Dr. Johnson’s maxim about the high road to London
turned out to be true in more ways than one. At the same time, one was expected to set aside the language and culture one had grown up with since childhood. But how far and how much? That was the question that the early Scottish Enlightenment confronted head-on, and with it something that has bedeviled the modern world ever since: the question of cultural identity.

  In fact, Scottish Whigs such as Robertson, Adam Smith, and David Hume confronted much the same problem that Indian, Chinese, and other Third World intellectuals would encounter a century or two later: how to deal with a dominant culture that one admired but that threatened to overwhelm one’s own heritage, and oneself with it. At times they tried to act as if there were really only one culture, a British culture, just as there was only kingdom, Great Britain. They even took to calling themselves “North Britons,” implying that any remaining difference between the two people was merely geographic. However, no Englishman ever referred to himself as a “South Briton,” and Scots knew it. No amount of political wishful thinking could close the cultural gap.

  One of the first to realize this was the poet James Thomson. Born in the Scottish border country, he was not only the first nature poet and forerunner of British Romanticism; he also composed the anthem of Scottish Whiggery, which would resound down through the next two centuries as rousing choruses of “Rule Britannia”:

  When Britain first at Heaven’s Command

  Arose from out the azure main,

  This was the charter of the land,