[2] Though born and raised in the Midwestern United States, his ancestry traces back to Norway; there are no Scots in his ancestral background of whom he is aware.

For common people to understand God's laws they had to be able to read the Bible, so schools were built in every parish and literacy rates grew rapidly, creating a Scottish-oriented market for books and writers.

The Scots immediately benefited from a centralized government that paid little attention to it—for example, inexpensive imports reduced the impacts of famines and allowed a Scottish culture to flourish.

There existed in Scotland a clergy who believed that a moral and religious foundation was required for, and compatible with, a free and open sophisticated culture, which moderated hardline conservatives.

Scottish colonial administrators, like James Mill, were instrumental in formulating the idea of the civilizing mission, which posited that Europeans should take over indigenous cultures and run their society for their own good, as part of "the white man's burden".

[5] In science and industry Herman states that James Watt's steam engine "gave capitalism its modern face, which has persisted down to today".

[6] It permitted business to choose its location, like in cities close to inexpensive labor, and it was Scots who rectified negative impacts industry had, i.e. the public health movement.

[1] Regarding this approach Michael Lynch of The Globe and Mail wrote, the biographies "reveal subtle but important links between these figures and their ideas, which Herman seeks to characterize, with some success, as a coherent body of distinctively 'Scottish' thought.

[11] The British version re-titled the book The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots invention of the Modern World and released in the UK market by Fourth Estate, a HarperCollins imprint.

[12] Regarding the title and thesis, that the people of Scotland invented the modern world, nearly every reviewer commented on it, some calling it "provocative",[14] a "hyperbole",[15] "absurd" and "pandering to prejudice".

The [Scots] did not, like a number of their French counterparts, seek to construct a new world ... they instead tried to understand certain traditions and institutions that had spontaneously arisen in the course of man's work, but that were still misunderstood even by many intelligent observers.

"[23] Irvine Welsh accused Herman of neglecting or down-playing some of the unfavourable actions by Scots, like the Highland Clearances, prominence in the slave trade, and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan.