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By Root 973 0

At the same time, Scots farmed barley in Lower Ontario and raised sheep in New South Wales. They dominated the lucrative American tobacco trade, sailed ships to the Niger, and sold opium in the Far East. In the 1780s, some 60 percent of the British merchants in Bengal were Scots. Many Scots rose to high positions, including James Murray, who became Britain's first governor of Canada in 1760, and James Dalhousie, who served as governor-general of India from 1848-56. “In British settlements from Canada to Ceylon, from Dunedin to Bombay,” wrote one nineteenth-century English statesman, “for every Englishman that you meet who has worked himself up to wealth from small beginnings without external aid, you find ten Scotchmen.” Indeed, Scots were so disproportionately represented in Britain's colonial exploits and outposts that some (Scottish) writers have suggested that the British Empire should more accurately be called the Scottish Empire.15

Scots not only provided manpower for the empire, but were also Britain's leading thinkers, writers, and inventors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The most famous philosopher of eighteenth-century Britain, David Hume, was Scottish. So was Adam Smith, often called the father of economics. Hume and Smith, along with less well known Scottish intellectuals such as William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, Francis Hutcheson, and Lord Kames, were products of Scotland's extraordinary universities, which, unlike Oxford or Cambridge, were relatively inexpensive and accessible to commoners. The Scots placed great value on education and erudition. By the end of the eighteenth century, Scotland boasted a higher literacy rate than any other country in the world, and even ordinary merchants could typically read Latin and Greek. The first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published in Edinburgh. The historian Thomas Carlyle, the poet Robert Burns, and the writers James Boswell, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson were all Scottish.

Remarkably, Scots were also the driving force in Britain's industrial revolution. By the 1830s, Scotland was the world's leading producer of iron, and Scottish firms were Britain's preeminent shipwrights. Moreover, the most critical invention of the era—the Watt steam engine—was perfected by the Scotsman James Watt in partnership with the English industrialist Matthew Boulton. The world's first source of independent power—no longer did factories have to be built next to a waterfall or gushing river—Watt's steam engine revolutionized modern economic life. Watt's invention eventually gave rise to the faceless industrial city epitomized by Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester. The steam engine also spurred further Scottish innovations, including the integrated cotton mill, the steam hammer, the modern blast furnace, and standardized machine tools. Last but not least, it was a Scotsman, James Nasmyth of Edinburgh, who in 1839 invented that most beloved of modern instruments, the dentist's drill.16

THE FRUITS OF TOLERANCE

By the opening of the twentieth century, the British Empire covered more than twelve million square miles, or an astonishing 25 percent of the world's land surface. If one includes the oceans— over which Britain was supreme—the figure would be closer to 70 percent of the globe. As with the Dutch empire, the source of Britain's world dominance lay in its unrivaled naval, commercial, and financial power. With its titanic fleet of battleships, the Royal Navy was probably more powerful than the next three or four navies put together. Indeed, for eighty years after 1815, no other nation (or alliance of nations) came close to challenging Britain's control of the seas.

In 1860, “over one-third of the world's merchant marine flew under the British flag, and that share was steadily increasing.” In addition, Britain became the world's banker, as well as the world's industrial and manufacturing giant. With just 2 percent of the world's population, mid-Victorian Britain had “a capacity in modern industries equal to 40-45 percent of the world's potential