In Northern Lights, David Denby explores “how modern life emerged from eighteenth-century Edinburgh,” while reviewing James Buchan’s Crowded with Genius:
Edinburgh in the early eighteenth century, Buchan says, ?looked and smelled like a medieval city.?It was an inauspicious place for intellectual revolution. Yet there were long-standing institutions of true distinction in Edinburgh, including the printing presses and the university. And Scottish Protestantism, however sour and intrusive, was a revolutionary force. John Knox, the brimstone-tempered Scot who founded the Presbyterian movement in the sixteenth century, had insisted on universal literacy; worshippers were expected to read the Bible and enter into intense communion with God on their own. Every congregation had its school, its local library, its contentious readers. And those who were well educated were extraordinarily well educated. Scotland had long maintained close ties to universities in Holland and France, and the scholars returning from Leiden or the Sorbonne were up to date on European intellectual currents in a way that men at Cambridge and Oxford often were not.
The tie with England was fraught with ambiguous tensions and dependencies, but, in the end, the economic benefits were real. The country?s political union with England, in 1707, may have occasioned resentment and nationalist nostalgia, but it gave Scotland access to world markets dominated by the British Empire. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Edinburgh had become prosperous from foreign trade.