Well to add to that list we can now say that Scotland invented philanthropy too!

I was recently asked by a friend to help her with a book about how people give in different parts of the world. It's a subject that is pretty close to my heart, and as I have travelled the world on my adventures in fundraising, I've often noted the huge differences in the culture of philanthropy from country to country.

When asked to contribute on giving in Scotland, I jumped at the chance to let the world know that our famed miserliness was untrue – indeed we are consistently amongst the most generous part of Europe for charitable donations. But I had to confess that while I knew this was the case I didn't know why! Until my research led me to two books, which dovetailed to convince me that Scotland did indeed invent Philanthropy.

The first book "Philanthropy Reconsidered" by George McCully, traces the birth of philanthropy to the growth of civic humanism in the 18th century. Nowhere was this stronger than in Scotland. The Scottish Enlightenment saw a huge outpouring of intellectual and scientific accomplishments with staggering results. Despite being the poorest country in Europe, by 1750 Scotland was the most educated; with over half the population able to read and write, libraries in every major town and the best universities in the world.

The great Scottish thinkers of the period included David Hume, Adam Smith, Robert Burns and Adam Ferguson. Cully explains how these writers shared a humanist outlook and proposed philanthropy as the essential key to human happiness. This distinguished the Scottish enlightenment from the corresponding changes sweeping Europe and had effects far beyond Scotland.

Here the story is taken up by "How the Scots invented the Modern World" by Arthur Herman. It tells of how the Scottish Enlightenment was a huge influence on American political, social and philosophical thinking. The philanthropic values of Scots clearly shaped the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution and informed the work of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in particular. The result was that the strongest nation the world has ever seen was created on a platform of philanthropy and civic society that was created, promoted and championed by Scots.

The legacy of this approach in the United States is a whole other story but here in Scotland there is strong evidence that the Enlightenment did serve to create the ethos that helping others is a shared social responsibility - a "Commonweal". While not unique to Scotland, it is certainly true that successive studies of charitable giving in the United Kingdom place Scottish donors as significantly more generous than most other parts of the UK.

300 years later the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment is still embedded in our national psyche and it is our job as fundraisers to understand this and tap into it. As a first step, I can thoroughly recommend these books.