Book Review Scots have reason for pride Great Scots How the Scots Created Canada By Matthew Shaw Capital of the Mind How Edinburgh changed the World By James Buchan, Paul Waters The Montreal Gazette January 24, 2004 Great Scot! Is there no end to it? Can there possibly be any room left on anyone�s shelf for yet two more books on the greatness of the Celts? Surely it�s time for a little modesty here, especially on the part of the Scots, who in the last few years appear to have abandoned several centuries of commendable reticence to publish half a dozen books claiming credit for creating- among other things- capitalism, the British Empire and, indeed, the modern world. Now we have Gaelophile ** Matthew Shaw crediting the Scots with creating Canada, which seems like an extravagant claim until you read James Buchan�s much thicker book crediting an extraordinary band of Edinburgh geniuses with nothing less than changing the way Europeans thought about just about everything- wealth, health, chemistry, politics, poetry, urban planning and the relations between the sexes. The remarkable thing is that both theses hold up � after a fashion. Shaw, who teaches humanities in British Columbia, makes no pretense of having written a scholarly book. Great Scots is too thin for that, for a start, with too many colour pictures and anecdotes. The perfect winter reader, in other words. But the light, bright stories make a serious case. It was, Shaw argues, Scots soldiers who took Quebec from the French (albeit, under a very untrusting English general), and it was Scots merchants and adventurers who ran the fur trade, built the railroads and generally opened the northern half of the continent to settlement- for better or worse. Indeed, it�s no accident that two of our longest rivers- the Fraser (Simon Fraser) and the MacKenzie- have Scottish names, and that our most famous national park is named for the little Scottish town of Banff. But even more interesting than Shaw�s long list of Gaelic accomplishments- first prime minister, first woman MP, first white man to reach the Pacific overland and so on- is the remarkable frequency with which he finds Scots on both sides of Canada�s historic squabbles. Scots, for example, ran both the Hudson�s bay Co. and the Northwest Co. during the long and bitter rivalry over the fur trade. And in 19th-century Upper Canada, it was the fiery William Lyon MacKenzie who led the rebellion against the oligarchic Family Compact run by fellow Scot John Strachan. In fact, though Shaw doesn�t mention it, there were even Scots on both sides at the battle of the Plains of Abraham. General Montcalm�s aide de camp was the Sieur de Johnston,** a Jacobite survivor of the Battle of Culloden. Canada, it seems, was the perfect outlet for the frustrated ambitions of Scots of all stripes. And if James Buchan is to be believed, at least one of the driving forces of that ambition was probably a sense of intellectual superiority. Damp, frigid, fractious Scotland really did flower in the 18th and 19th centuries, thanks largely to Edinburgh�s remarkable rise from boggy backwater to �Athens of the north.� Buchan does an elegant and scholarly job of describing this transformation, even if he fails to offer a satisfactory explanation for why it was that one grim little northern town in a sudden flash of brilliance produced Adam Smith, who pretty much invented modern economics; James Boswell, who reinvented biography; David Hume, who laid the foundations of modern philosophy. Add to that the poetry of Robert Burns, the romances od Sir Walter Scott and the pioneering work of such scientists as geologist James Hutton and chemist James Black, and Edinburgh�s accomplishments really do beggar the imagination. It�s almost enough to tempt an atheist like Hume to believe that if there was a god, he was probably a Scotsman. It�s also gratifying to see Scotland�s often overlooked accomplishments committed to print with such verve, especially for those of us who have endured a lifetime of silly Sussenach (now there�s a redundancy) jokes about haggis, bagpipes and what a Scotsman wears under his kilt. Still, perhaps after these two fine and (as far as I can tell) absolutely accurate books, it might be graceful to give it a rest for a while and let someone else share the limelight, the Greeks, perhaps, or the Italians. It�s rumoured they�ve made some contributions to world history as well. --------------------------------- Post your free ad now! Yahoo! Canada Personals