How Edinburgh Changed The World: The Scottish Enlightenment

In a single day in 1624, eleven women accused of witchcraft were reported to have been tried and executed in Edinburgh.

For centuries, Edinburgh’s Old Town was rife with superstition; anarchy, immorality and crime were endemic along its narrow streets and secretive wynds and closes. Yet barely more than a hundred years after those eleven executions, as Edinburgh expanded beyond its punishing walls with the emergence of the New Town, some of the world’s greatest minds were engaging in a new approach to living and learning, helping to forge not only a dynamic and forward-thinking city, but the very structures that underpin modern society across the globe.

Edinburgh is the city from which emerged many technological breakthroughs that have revolutionised the world, from medical x-rays and anaesthesia to the electric toaster and the telephone. Even the humble digestive biscuit and the (not so unassuming) deep fried Mars bar have their roots in Edinburgh’s creative mindset. But it was the Scottish Enlightenment that made these things possible, by revolutionising academic thinking and turning minds away from the rigidity of scripture, instead proposing a more scientific approach to learning that placed greater emphasis on understanding from observation and analysis.

The Scottish Enlightenment spawned a revolution in art, literature, medicine, engineering, science and politics, all underpinned by a new philosophy. Driven by the work of David Hume, one of the world’s greatest philosophers whose statue stands proudly along the Royal Mile today, Edinburgh’s populace began to throw off the age-old superstitions that had, for centuries, guided their daily lives. Instead, they pondered the serious questions of the day, about morality and religion, wrote, discussed and debated. And from this different way of thinking grew a new society in which the crowded, unhealthy conditions of the Old Town could be left behind, as Edinburgh – the ‘Athens of the North’ – surged ahead, inspiring the people of the city, and the country, to grow intellectually as world leaders.

Today, thousands of promising intellectual minds arrive at Edinburgh’s universities from all over the world, many engaged in the technology and medicine for which the city is renowned. But the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment is widespread, in every piece of engineering that owes its roots to the Industrial Revolution; in modern economic systems and financial houses; in the chambers of democracy in nations the world over; and in trade between nations across the globe.