How the Scots Invented the Modern World (10 page)

A strong government that leaves well enough alone: this was the dual, seemingly contradictory, nature of the British state as it became part of life in post-union Scotland. Scots became used to these dualities, and learned to accept them as basic reality, just as the Union itself involved a fundamental duality: “a ship of state with a double-bottomed hull,” as Jonathan Swift put it. They also learned to think in a new way as a result of the Union: in terms of the long term.

“In the long term,” wrote the English economist John Maynard Keynes, “we are all dead.” The Scottish Enlightenment learned a different lesson from the changes brought by union with England. Its greatest thinkers, such as Adam Smith and David Hume, understood that change constantly involves trade-offs, and that short-term costs are often compensated by long-term benefits. “Over time,” “on balance,” “on the whole”—these are favorite sentiments, if not expressions, of the eighteenth-century enlightened Scot. More than any other, they capture the complex nature of modern society. And the proof came with the Act of Union.

Here was a treaty, a legislative act inspired not by some great political vision or careful calculation of the needs of the future, or even by patriotism. Most if not all of those who signed it were thinking about urgent and immediate circumstances; they were in fact thinking largely about themselves, often in the most venal terms. Yet this act—which in the short term destroyed an independent kingdom, created huge political uncertainties both north and south, and sent Scotland’s economy into a tailspin—turned out,
in the long term,
to be the making of modern Scotland

Nor did Scots have to wait that long. Already by the 1720s, as the smoke and tumult of the Fifteen was clearing, there were signs of momentous changes in the economy. Grain exports more than doubled, as Scottish agriculture recovered from the horrors of the Lean Years and learned to become more commercial in its outlook. Lowland farmers would be faced now not with starvation, but with falling prices due to grain surpluses. Glasgow merchants entered the Atlantic trade with English colonies in America, which had always been closed to them before. By 1725 they were taking more than 15 percent of the tobacco trade. Inside of two decades, they would be running it.

A wide range of goods, not just tobacco but also molasses, sugar, cotton, and tea, flooded into Scotland. Finished goods, particularly linen textiles and cotton products, began to flood out, despite the excise tax. William Mackintosh of Borlum saw even in 1729 that Scotland’s landed gentry were living better than they ever had, “more handsomely now in dress, table, and house furniture.” Glasgow, the first hub of Scotland’s transatlantic trade, would soon be joined by Ayr, Greenock, Paisley, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh. By the 1730s the Scottish economy had turned the corner. By 1755 the value of Scottish exports had more than doubled. And it was due almost entirely to the effect of overseas trade, “the golden ball” as Andrew Fletcher had contemptuously called it, which the Union of 1707 had opened.

Fletcher himself had died in 1716. He played no part in the Fifteen. His attitude toward Jacobite and Whig was “a plague on both their houses.” Almost his last words were, “Lord have mercy on my poor Country that is so barbarously oppressed.” Ironically enough, he died in the oppressor’s capital, in London—on his way home from Europe, where he spent most of the years after the Union treaty. Someone had asked him when he left Scotland, “Will you forsake your country?” He answered, “It is only fit for the slaves who sold it.” How strange that the laird of Saltoun, who had once been prepared to turn a large portion of his fellow countrymen into slaves, should use that word to describe the Scots who had repudiated his retrograde vision for the kingdom. How strange, too, that a man who claimed to despise trade and traders should choose to spend so much of his life in large, cosmopolitan cities— London, Paris, Amsterdam—that were built by mercantile wealth. It was precisely that wealth which he had hoped to deny Scotland, for the sake of an abstract and austere ideal of liberty. It was that wealth which Scotland’s urban centers now enjoyed by being part of Britain, and which promised to create a new and very different Scotland.

Yet the Act of Union could not by itself force that change to come about. Instead, the next crucial stage of Scotland’s emergence into the modern world did not come from outside influences, but from deep within two of its own institutions: its universities and its law courts.

CHAPTER THREE

The Proper Study of Mankind I

The proper Study of Mankind is Man.

—Alexander Pope

It was an eighteenth-century Englishman, Alexander Pope, who said it. But it was a pair of Scots, Francis Hutcheson and Lord Kames, who proved it.

As the founding fathers of the Scottish Enlightenment, they are a study in contrasts. One was a clergyman and teacher, considerate of his students, diffident and soft-spoken, who nonetheless inspired a generation of Scottish intellectuals—“the never to be forgotten Hutcheson,” as his most famous pupil, Adam Smith, called him. Kames was a lawyer and a judge. Tough and outspoken, he was a formidable presence in the rough-and-tumble world of the Scottish legal system who rose to the Scottish equivalent of the Supreme Court. Kames had to write his influential books on the origins of law and society—there were more than twenty of them—in between court sessions. His view of the world was pragmatic, worldly, even cynical, compared with that of the high-minded Hutcheson. But together they revolutionized the Scottish intellect, and created a new understanding of human nature and society that has lasted down to today.

What makes the Scottish Enlightenment so important? When you mention the Enlightenment to most people, it conjures up images of glittering aristocratic salons lit by scores of candles, of scandalous wit and cultivated laughter, of bewigged philosophers and critics pressing their progressive ideas on various European autocrats. Voltaire visiting Frederick the Great at Sans Souci; Denis Diderot editing the
Encyclopédie
and urging Catherine the Great of Russia to outlaw the use of torture and the knout; Jean-Jacques Rousseau scandalizing polite society in the years leading to the French Revolution. Indeed, the famous names of the French Enlightenment seem to dominate almost every discussion of culture in the eighteenth century.

This is a mistake. The Scottish Enlightenment may have been less glamorous, but it was in many ways more robust and original. More important, it was at least as influential. In fact, if one were to draw up a list of the books that dominated the thinking of Europeans in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the Scottish names stand out. Adam Smith’s
A Theory of Moral Sentiments
and
Wealth of Nations.
David Hume’s
Treatise of Human Nature
and
Essays Political, Literary, and Moral.
William Robertson’s History of Scotland and History of the Reign of Charles V. Adam Ferguson’s
Essay on the History of Civil Society.
John Millar’s
The Origin of
the Distinction of Ranks.
Thomas Reid’s
Inquiry into the Human Mind.
And at the top of the page, Francis Hutcheson’s
System of Moral Philosophy
and Lord Kames’s
Sketches of the History of Man.

It is an impressive list. If one had to identify two themes that most of these works share, they would be “history” and “human nature.” Indeed, it is the Scots who first linked them together. The Scottish Enlightenment presented man as the product of history. Our most fundamental character as human beings, they argued, even our moral character, is constantly evolving and developing, shaped by a variety of forces over which we as individuals have little or no control. We are ultimately creatures of our environment: that was the great discovery that the “Scottish school,” as it came to be known, brought to the modern world.

At the same time, they also insisted that these changes are not arbitrary or chaotic. They rest on certain fundamental principles and discernible patterns. The study of man is ultimately a
scientific
study. The Scots are the true inventors of what we today call the social sciences: anthropology, ethnography, sociology, psychology, history, and, as mention of the name Adam Smith makes us realize, economics. But their interests went beyond that.

The Scottish Enlightenment embarked on nothing less than a massive reordering of human knowledge. It sought to transform every branch of learning—literature and the arts; the social sciences; biology, chemistry, geology, and the other physical and natural sciences—into a series of organized disciplines that could be taught and passed on to posterity. The great figures of the Scottish Enlightenment never lost sight of their educational mission. Most were teachers or university professors; others were clergymen, who used their pulpits and sermons for the same purpose. Some, like Hutcheson, Ferguson, and Thomas Reid, were both. In every case, the goal of intellectual life was to understand in order to teach others, to enable the next generation to learn what you yourself have mastered and build on it. From the Scots’ point of view, the advancement of human understanding was an essential part of the ascent of man in history.

This attitude produced one great achievement that would live on long after the Scottish Enlightenment itself had all but departed from the scene. In fact, to this day most of us have it on our bookshelves or on our computer disks. We and our children use it almost daily. It is called the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
the first volume of which appeared in Edinburgh in 1768. Its editors intended it to be a complete summary of scientific and human knowledge, incorporating the latest discoveries as part of a coherent and graspable whole. It worked. While the French Enlightenment’s version, Diderot’s
Encyclopédie,
is today merely a historical curiosity, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
has continued to grow, develop, and change over two centuries—just as its first editors had intended.

The editors of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
also regarded their handiwork as a
British
encyclopedia—not an English encyclopedia, or even an Scottish one. They, like all the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, saw themselves as Britons, members of a new, modern community created by the Act of Union. Some even dropped the term “Scots” altogether, and began referring to themselves as “North Britons.” It was not as strange a locution as it sounds. In their minds, the Act of Union of 1707 had closed a door on an earlier era, on Scotland’s cramped, crabbed, and violent past. The key question for Scots now had to be, where do we go from here?

It was Hutcheson and Kames who first laid out the contours of this new cultural landscape. Their disciples and followers—Smith, Hume, Robertson, and the rest—would fill in and embellish the areas they initially staked out. A new mental world was taking shape in Scotland’s cities and universities, very different from that of medieval Scotland or the austere fundamentalism of the Reformation Kirk. At its center lay not God any longer, but human beings. Human beings considered as individuals but also as the products, even the playthings, of historical and social change: in other words, human beings as we understand them today.

Francis Hutcheson was the son of a Presbyterian clergyman, but in the “other” Scotland, the Ulster settlements of northern Ireland. In 1606 two Scottish noblemen, Hugh Montgomery and James Hamilton, arranged an amnesty for the Irish rebel Con O’Neill in exchange for a third of his vast property holdings in counties Down and Antrim. They then encouraged tenants from other parts of Scotland to settle there and establish farms. James I realized this could be a useful way to pacify the Catholic Irish in the neighboring territory. In 1610 he set aside nearly half a million acres across six counties, promising land to any settler willing to take the Oath of Supremacy (meaning they recognized James as the head of the English Church, which automatically excluded any Catholics). The settlers came in two great waves: first Highlanders from the Western Isles, then Lowlanders and some English emigrants financed by merchants in London (hence the name of the town where many made their homes, Londonderry). However, it was the Scots who predominated, and who left their stamp on the six counties of Protestant Ulster. Today Americans call their descendants “Scotch-Irish,” but we must consider them Scots in every significant respect. In truth, they are the first representatives of the great Scottish diaspora that changed the rest of the world.

The Ulster Scots were genuine legatees of John Knox, with their fundamentalist religious zeal, their aggressive egalitarianism, and “their love of education and their anxiety to have an educated ministry,” in James McCosh’s famous phrase. Two of those ministers were Francis Hutcheson’s grandfather and father. John Hutcheson was pastor of Armagh when his son Francis was born in 1694. Francis received his first education at his grandfather’s house. It seemed only natural and proper that he follow in their footsteps as a minister.

By then the Ulster Scots community had been through much. In the decades before Hutcheson’s birth, they had endured massacre by dispossessed Irish Catholics, including the wholesale murder of men, women, and children at Portadown in 1641, and paid them back in kind. Many had signed the National Covenant, and backed the Parliamentary forces against Charles I. They had submitted to Cromwell’s rule, and defied James II and the French at the gates of Londonderry in 1687. Like life in America’s frontier West, life in Ulster had hardened and toughened its inhabitants into a tight-knit community. They felt surrounded by hostile forces, not only the native Irish but the Anglican officials of a “foreign” government in London. Thrown back on their own resources, Ulster Scots clung fiercely to their independent status and Scottish ways, including their Presbyterian faith.