Thus noted Werner Sombart, one of Germany's most influential thinkers on capitalism at the time (alongside Max Weber), in his study on Der Bourgeois in 1913. Sombart's emphasis on Scotland seems striking only inasmuch as recent global histories of capitalism, industrialisation and modern economic growth have usually been written from a perspective focusing on either England (or certain regions within England) or the Netherlands as norm template proxies for ‘Western Europe’, when studying the so-called ‘Great Divergence’ and processes of global economic modernisation. The small northern presbyterian nation is

usually left out of the picture, including studies taking an expressly ‘British’ perspective. Just consider pars pro toto the signature and flagship project ‘Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain’: even though the second edition (2004) did feature a chapter on Scotland written by Devine, the editors of the third edition (2018) decided to leave that chapter out again; the first edition had contained no such chapter, either, conceived in the usual imperial or Anglocentric epistemic perspective. Most accounts of British economic growth in historical perspective to the present day either omit or – even worse – extrapolate Scotland after 1707, often inferring Scottish gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates by using (constant) population ratios. To the present day we lack estimates for Scottish GDP after 1707 of the sort that have been produced for England since the eleventh century using various (and changing) econometric techniques.

This is a more than sad – albeit still common – omission. Sombart, dismissing Catholic Ireland (‘Down to this very day there is scarcely another land which has been so little affected by the capitalist spirit’), thought that Scotland had even influenced England in the development of capitalism: ‘the course of capitalist development in England was greatly influenced by the fortunes of the capitalist spirit in the Northern Kingdom’.