How the Scots Invented the Modern World (16 page)

That “intimacy” has only gotten started at the agricultural stage, however. A further stage lies beyond, as activity shifts from the village and farm to the seaport and market town. A new society springs up, born of the buying and selling of goods and services, “commercial society.” It brings even more benefits, and more cooperation, but also more complexity. It requires new laws—contract and maritime law, laws governing the sale and distribution of commodities—but also generates new attitudes and manners.

Commerce tends to wear off those prejudices which maintain distinction and animosity between nations. It softens and polishes the manners of men. It unites them, by one of the strongest of all ties, the desire of supplying their mutual wants. It disposes them to peace, by establishing in every state an order of citizens bound by their interest to be the guardians of public tranquility. As soon as the commercial spirit gains . . . an ascendant in any society, we discover a new genius in its policy, its alliances, its wars, and its negotiations.

This was not Lord Kames speaking, or even Adam Smith. It was Smith’s friend William Robertson, cleric and historian, and later Principal of the University of Edinburgh. Robertson’s great contribution to the Enlightenment was to take Kames’s four-stage theory and apply it to the history of Europe since the fall of Rome. By doing so, he created the modern study of history, turning Kames’s evolutionary model into a way of organizing the history of Western civilization.

The year was 1769, and the book was
The History of the Reign of Emperor
Charles V. Robertson demonstrated how the Dark Ages marked the return of a pastoral-nomadic society to Europe, with barbarian tribes such as the Vandals and Franks, and how the revival of agriculture, the third stage of civil society, brought with it the seeds of medieval feudalism. Then, starting in the Low Countries and Italy, merchants revived trade in its ancient home, the Mediterranean, and the fourth stage, commercial society, was born in its European guise. “In proportion as commerce made its way into the different countries of Europe,” Robertson concluded, “they successively . . . adopted those manners, which occupy and distinguish polished nations.” Politeness, as Lord Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson had understood it, now had a firm historical basis.

At each stage of civil society, Kames, Smith, and Robertson said, the way people earn their living shapes the character of their laws, their government, and their culture. Who we are depends on whether we are hunters and gatherers, or shepherds and nomads, or farmers and peasants, or merchants and manufacturers—the latter being the makers of “commercial society,” or, to use a more familiar term,
capitalism
. Almost one hundred years before Karl Marx, Kames and the Scots had discovered the underlying cause of historical change: changes in the “means of production.”

Kames had done two other remarkable things. First he had developed a flexible, sliding scale by which to characterize and compare different societies, in the past or the present, based on their position in the four-stage process. Modern England and France clearly fit the modern commercial stage, as did ancient Athens and Renaissance Italy. Medieval England, on the other hand, belonged to the agrarian stage, as did eighteenth-century Russia. The ancient Hebrews and the Indians of the American Plains fit the pastoral-nomadic—along with the Highland clans of Kames’s own Scotland.

But none could be said to be forever fixed or static. This was the point: Human communities are in a state of constant evolution, as they slowly, sometimes inperceptibly, make their way from one stage to the next, higher stage. Kames’s followers borrowed a French term for this process of social evolution. They called it “civilization,” meaning a transformation of society from primitive barbarism to a civilized “polite” state.

The four-stage theory of civilization defined human history as a continuous vista of secular progress. Understanding the character of those different stages, and identifying the crucial moving parts in each, would become the task of the Scottish historical imagination for the next hundred years.

But Kames had also solved the question Francis Hutcheson had by implication posed, but never quite answered: Why, if everyone has the same desire to be free and happy, as Hutcheson had claimed, are there so many societies in which people are neither?

Now Lord Kames gives us the answer. Because, under certain primitive material conditions, when resources are scarce or in uncertain supply, the rights of the individual have to give way to the imperatives of the group. The Bushman hunter divides his kill with the rest of his little clan, whether he wishes to or not, because otherwise the group might starve. During the Dark Ages, peasants were bound to the land to produce food, because no one knew when the next attack by marauding Vikings or Saracens might disrupt the harvest and plunge the community into famine.

Under these harsh conditions, society cannot afford to trust individual choice or inclination. Men are guided instead by custom, and the personal authority of those they do trust—“the elders of the tribe” or a warrior nobility. The laws are strict, the punishments harsh.

Then, as material conditions improve,
as they inevitably will
when human beings devise new ways to increase their stock of property, the institutions governing the community also improve. In short, material progress—from the relative scarcity of the hunter-gatherer Bushmen to the relative prosperity of mercantile London and Edinburgh—brings other kinds of progress in its wake. The affluence and mutually beneficial union of commercial society “softens and polishes the manners of men,” as Robertson put it. Individual conscience is prepared to do the work that laws, and fearful punishments and taboos, used to do. As a modern social scientist would say, the rules of socialization are internalized. We no longer need awe-inspiring authority figures—kings and nobles, popes and priests—to tell us what to do, or what is right and wrong. “The moral sense,” Kames explained, “is openly recognized, and cheerfully submitted to.” Hutcheson’s community of free and active human beings becomes possible, and the old collective traditions and constraints give way to individual liberty.

Even in Scotland. On the heels of the Jacobite revolt of 1745,
⁸
Kames published his
Essay Upon Several Subjects Concerning British
Antiquities.
In it Kames demonstrated that the politics of traditional Scotland was not about loyalty and devotion to the king, as Jacobites claimed, but about royal land grants, which enabled the king to reward his closest followers and secure control over the people. This was the origin of feudalism. “No Constitution,” he wrote, “gives [the sovereign] such an immediate hold of the persons and property of his subjects.” Scotland’s traditional laws were not bulwarks of political freedom, as Andrew Fletcher and the rest had used to argue. They were in fact an invitation to despotism.

Then came the sweep of historical change. “After the arts of peace began to be cultivated” at the close of the Middle Ages, “manufacturers and trade began to revive in Europe, and riches to encrease,” and the feudal system “behoved to turn extreme burdensome. It first tottered, and then fell of its own weight, as wanting a solid foundation.” Feudalism loses out to trade and commerce, because it runs counter to “love of independence and property, the most steady and industrious of all human appetites.” Commercial society supplies that “love of independence” in abundance. It encourages men to overturn custom and tradition, and establish a new kind of law, based on a free circulation of goods and services.

Already, in 1747, Kames recognized what Adam Smith and later economists would confirm. More than any other stage of society, the commercial stage represents the greatest change from the past. This progress comes at a price: the overturning of almost everything that came before, in laws, in forms of government, even in manners and morals. Capitalism’s innate capacity for creative destruction would fascinate Kames’s followers, including Adam Smith, who would witness its awesome power in the Lowlands and Highlands of their own day.

The four-stage theory, which Kames revised and refined in his
Sketches
on the History of Man
when he was nearly eighty, would live on after him. It served as the model for William Robertson and others of the “Scottish historical school,” and for the great masterpiece of Enlightenment history, Edward Gibbon’s
The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire.
It defined the fields of comparative anthropology and sociology for two hundred years, and inspired a historical genre, “the story of civilization,” that would last down to Arnold Toynbee’s
A Study
of History
and William McNeill’s
The Rise of the West.
And at its core was Kames’s notion that changing forms of property drove the evolution of civil society. “Without private property,” he wrote in the
Sketches,
“there would be no industry, and without industry, men would remain savages forever.”

Today, of course, we have grown suspicious of attempts to classify entire societies as “savage” or “civilized.” The multiculturalist teaches us to see them as misleading stereotypes, which denigrate certain non-Western peoples, especially peoples of color, in order to exalt our own Western values. We try to dismiss the four-stage theory as “ethnocentric” or even racist.

It is true that the four-stage theory would help to underpin racial theory in the nineteenth century. But at the time it served a powerful and useful purpose. It enabled people to think of history as a
progressive
enterprise, with change as a normal, even desirable, feature of society, rather than an undesirable one. It also
cut across
issues of race. Enlightened Scots had no difficulty in thinking of China or Persia as “civilized ” or even “commercial” societies, just as they understood primitiveness and savagery to be prominent aspects of their own white European past—or, in the case of the Highlands, in their own backyard. It immunized the Scottish historical imagination against attempts to make race determine culture. Nurture, not nature, explained human behavior and institutions. Kames himself dismissed the idea that Africans and blacks were inherently inferior to whites. Who can say, he wondered, what kind of society they might produce, if they had the occasion to exercise their powers of freedom, as European whites had?

Kames and Robertson may have been willing to make “value judgments” about other societies and peoples, but they did it without concerning themselves with skin color. The fundamental issue for them was not race but human liberty, much as it was for Francis Hutcheson. And the proof of it came in the Joseph Knight case.

Joseph Knight was an African-born slave sold in Jamaica, whose master took him to Scotland in 1769. Three years later Knight learned about the celebrated decision by the English Chief Justice Lord Mansfield
⁹
that slavery was contrary to the laws of England. Knight assumed this included the rest of Britain. Knight went to his master and demanded wages for the work he had been doing for free. His master refused. When Knight tried to run away, the master had him arrested.

When the case came before the Sheriff of Perth, however, he ruled that there was no slavery in Scotland, and that the slave laws of Jamaica had no validity in his jurisdiction. He let Knight go. Knight’s master appealed, and in 1777 the case arrived at the Court of Session in Edinburgh. It was momentous enough that it was granted a full hearing in front of the full panel of judges, including Lord Kames. History was about to be made, and not just for Scot-land.

Knight’s advocate told the judges, “The law of Jamaica in this case, will not be supported by the Court: because it is repugnant to the first principles of morality and justice.” James Boswell had helped him to prepare his brief for Knight’s freedom, with the advice of another tireless opponent of slavery, Samuel Johnson. Their argument was simple: “No man is by nature the property of another.” To become the legitimate chattel of another person, he must renounce that original natural freedom. If there is no proof he has done this (and Knight’s own actions clearly proved the opposite), then he must be set free.

Kames, who was now over eighty, vigorously assented. “We sit here to enforce right,” he told his colleagues, “not to enforce wrong.” The majority of the court agreed with Kames. They wrote, “The dominion assumed over the negro, under the law of Jamaica, being unjust, could not be supported in this country to any extent.” They pronounced slavery to be against the law in Scotland, and set Knight free. James Boswell was jubilant. He pointed out to friends that although Lord Mansfield had made a similar ruling five years earlier, the Scottish decision was more significant, because it established a broader principle. It went “to the general question, whether a perpetual obligation of service to one master
in any mode
should be sanctioned by the laws of a free country.” It was a vindication of the historical point Kames had been making for years, that what might have been suitable or necessary for ancient or primitive societies may not be now. Progress was possible, in law as well as in everything else.

But it was also a vindication of the Scottish approach to the law. Kames and his fellow judges had decided the case not on precedent but on “the dictate of reason,” in order to assert a basic principle of equity and justice. It was a victory for the notion that man’s claim to liberty is universal. What Francis Hutcheson had first asserted in his Glasgow classroom had now been confirmed by Kames and the judges of the Court of Session.