Scots did their part to suppress the rebels too: at least one Montreal volunteer regiment wore tartan stripes on their trousers. Despite McGoogan’s ten pages devoted to William Lyon Mackenzie as an ostensible “maker of 1867” (a curious anachronism), Mackenzie was not the only Scot in the 1837 rebellions. They not only scaled the Heights of Abraham for General Wolfe, but laid siege to Bangalore, Saringapatam, and Pondicherry before charging the gates. The obvious, belaboured role played by Scots in shaping Canada is really a facet of their wider role as empire-builders. This was followed by an academic collection under the more temporizing title, Kingdom of the Mind: How the Scots Helped Make Canada in 2006, the same year as Paul Cowan’s How the Scots Created Canada. In 2003, Matthew Shaw wrote Great Scots: How the Scots Created Canada. Ken McGoogan’s How the Scots Invented Canada is not the first iteration. Yet the mighty Scot is now credited not only with devising golf, bagpipes, whisky, curling, and haggis but with “inventing the modern world” and “creating” or “inventing” Canada. The vainglorious “here’s tae us” refrain, to which the rest of us are subjected, is almost endearing. THE SCOTS RANK AMONG history’s great self-mythologizers, mostly at the expense of the English.

The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History. HarperCollins, 2010.Ī Fleeting Empire: Early Stuart Britain and the Merchant Adventurers to Canada. James Kerr, Keeper of the Records: “Half our nation was bribed by English money.” Johnson: “Sir, that is no defence: that makes you worse!”

“When I find a Scotchman to whom an Englishman is as a Scotchman, that Scotchman shall be as an Englishman to me.” - Samuel Johnson

How scotland invented the modern world