Arthur Herman, an American historian then teaching at George Mason University, makes the case that the Scottish Enlightenment—a small set of Edinburgh and Glasgow thinkers in the eighteenth century—shaped modern liberal democracy, capitalism, and intellectual life out of proportion to the size of the country that produced it. He follows David Hume on epistemology and political economy, Adam Smith on markets and moral sentiments, Adam Ferguson on civil society, Francis Hutcheson on ethics, and Thomas Reid on common-sense philosophy, and shows how their work was carried into the wider world by Scottish emigrants, schoolteachers, ministers, engineers, and soldiers. The book follows Scots into the American Revolution (where their writings shaped the Founders and where they staffed the new colleges), into the British Empire's administration of India and the Caribbean, into the industrial development of Glasgow and Pittsburgh, into the founding of Princeton and Hong Kong, and into the literary culture of the nineteenth century via Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Herman writes for general readers in the manner of Paul Johnson or Niall Ferguson, with confident generalizations and a sympathetic eye for individual achievement. The book has become a popular point of entry for readers interested in the intellectual history that produced ideas of free markets, religious toleration, and self-government.