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canter, there was one obvious and defining characteristic. Each of them was a Scot. Had Macdonald not been a Scot himself, he wouldn’t have moved up nearly as fast. His own talents mattered a great deal, of course. But it mattered critically that other Scots were prepared to help him because he was one of their own; it mattered as much that they themselves were doing well enough to be able to provide realhelp. Before Macdonald’s ascent is tracked, it’s necessary first to place him in the context within which he operated. As he moved upwards, he did so as a member of a distinct and uncommonly successful ethnic group.

    Macdonald came by his Scottishness through his parents, of course. The benefits of this gift to him were multiplied many times over by another happenstance—one of timing. Macdonald was a Scot when it was the best time in history to be a Scot.
    Early in the nineteenth century, the Scots exploded outwards from a small, poor, backward society to become, collectively, one of the most admired and respected of all societies of the day; more remarkable yet, a great many of them had gone on to become the first “citizens of the world.” Through the greater part of the century, Scots accomplished more in more places around the globe than did any other people. Nowhere was this more true than in British North America, the country to which Macdonald’s parents had just brought him.
    Until about the middle of the eighteenth century, Scots were regarded generally as rude and crude at best, and at worst as outright savages. They were brave, of course, with the special allure of a fiercely proud, freedom-loving people, but backward, self-enclosed, impossible to comprehend. (Indeed, they were not dissimilar to the Métis of the prairies, with whom Macdonald would later so tragically find it difficult to come to terms.) The Scots all knew how to eat porridge properly (standing up, with salt) and how to position exactly the skein dhu dagger (in the stocking, just below a kilt-clad knee). Suddenly, before the eighteenth century ended, all this parochialism was replaced by intellectualism and internationalism. Of the transformation, Voltaire would declare,“It is to Scotland that we look for our idea of civilization.”
    In a transformation that has few national equivalents, a poor, quasi-feudal society turned almost overnight into a society of ideas and creative energy. The catalyst of change was the Scottish Enlightenment, which, during the period from 1740 to 1790, made the small capital of Edinburgh into an intellectual and cultural rival of any other city of the time, only London and Paris excepted. The two superstars of the Scottish Enlightenment were David Hume, the first modern philosopher, and Adam Smith, the first modern economist. At the time, a cluster of others were as well regarded as these two, among them Lord Kames, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson, William Reid and William Robertson.
    This extraordinary story has been told lovingly and adroitly by Arthur Herman in his book How the Scots Invented the World, subtitled, with only a slight exaggeration, The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Country Created Our World and Everything in It. Herman’s thesis is that Edinburgh attained “a self-consciously modern view” that is now “so deeply rooted in the assumptions and institutions that govern our lives that we often miss its significance, not to mention its origins.” In fact, Herman never resolves satisfactorily why this achievement should have happened in the particular society of Scotland, so small and backward. The nearest he comes is to argue that, after union with England in 1707, Scottish intellectuals had to cope with the challenge, today common, of “deal[ing] with a dominant culture that one admired but that threatened to overwhelm one’s own heritage and oneself with it.”
    Those Scots were grappling with some of the most