My aim in this concluding chapter is to identify what the Scots understand by ‘commercial society’ and what is distinctive about it. This exercise will also serve to highlight particular episodes in the story told in the preceding chapters.

The core of the idea of a commercial society is that it is a ‘society’, not a polity or a clan, even though it contains governments and families. These latter two are component parts of the interlocking set of institutions, behaviours and values that constitute a ‘society’. This integration is as true of the Iroquois, the Tartars, feudal Europe and city-states of the ancient and Renaissance world as it is of commercial societies. The world of commerce has its own distinctive set and this distinctiveness is the work of history. To reiterate my earlier formulation (p. 49), in the work of the Scots, commercial society has both a synchronic and diachronic dimension.

We can piece together some key features of a commercial society from the earlier discussion. From Chapter 3 we learnt that commercial societies were prosperous in virtue of the systemic employment of the division of labour. We also know that this prosperity was diffused; all participants in the market, even the relatively poor, were better off absolutely than in any other period. This diffusion of ‘universal opulence’ further differentiated a modern commercial society from life in trading cities like Venice, which were rigorously policed to keep the ruling oligarchy in their pre-eminent position and even more from the slave-based classical republics.