The Scottish Enlightenment
Edinburgh and Glasgow become centres of European thought, as David Hume, Adam Smith, James Hutton and others reshape philosophy, economics, geology and medicine.
- The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation — Alexander Broadie, Birlinn (2001)
- Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life — Nicholas Phillipson, Allen Lane (2010)
- The Scottish Nation 1700–2000 — T. M. Devine, Allen Lane (1999)
In the decades after Culloden, Scotland’s universities, clubs and churches nurtured an astonishing cluster of thinkers. David Hume questioned religion and the foundations of knowledge; Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) founded modern economics; Adam Ferguson pioneered sociology; James Hutton argued that the Earth was unimaginably old; and William Cullen and Joseph Black transformed medicine and chemistry. Edinburgh, the “Athens of the North”, built its elegant New Town. Historians link the flowering to Scotland’s high literacy, its five universities against England’s two, a Kirk that became more moderate, and a practical urge to improve a backward country. James Watt’s improvements to the steam engine, made in Glasgow, linked the age of ideas to the industrial revolution.
- The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation — Alexander Broadie, Birlinn (2001)
- Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life — Nicholas Phillipson, Allen Lane (2010)
- The Scottish Nation 1700–2000 — T. M. Devine, Allen Lane (1999)
Why it matters today
The Enlightenment is a source of quiet national pride: the sense that a small, poor country produced ideas that changed the world, from economics to the age of the Earth. It sustains Scotland's self-image as a nation of education and invention, and Edinburgh's New Town, built in this era, is its monument.