Since the coming to prominence of the Scottish National Party and its campaign for independence, some writing on the military history of Scotland has verged on the overtly political. The key battleground has been “identity,” probably more a modern than a historical concept, and it is this issue that underpins Victoria Henshaw's first book. She claims that historians have concentrated on Jacobitism and the military campaigns in 1715, 1719, and 1745–46 to the exclusion of the administration, organization, personnel, and politics of the British Army in post-Union Scotland. Encased within Bloomsbury Academic's dull and unimaginative standard cover that makes its every product look like something from a school stock cupboard in the 1950s are six chapters investigating Scotland's professional soldiers prior to 1700; rankers' everyday lives in “North Britain”; the relationships between Scottish officers and the British state; the auxiliary forces; barracks, military roads and fortifications; and conclusions. Inter alia, the author provides much useful information about civil-military interaction, the workings of the law, the evolution of the Highland Companies, the re-foundation of the Scottish militia, other “fencible” organizations, patronage, and the political persuasions of the higher echelons of the command structure. She argues that nearly all Scottish officers were Whiggish in 1707 (although the prosopographical base employed is too small for the deductions to be wholly convincing) and grew increasingly “British” as a consequence of the Union and Jacobite threats, thus supporting Linda Colley's view that “Britishness” was achieved through consistent hostility towards France throughout the eighteenth century and during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The three middle chapters contain much valuable information and argument and add considerably to knowledge of the army in Scotland during the first half of the eighteenth century, but unfortunately the book suffers from a number of shortcomings.

There are serious problems with design, presentation, and the arrangement of material. Henshaw states that the book has been “transformed” out of a Birmingham University PhD thesis, but the extent is open to question. The “literature review,” regrettably now a standard component of doctoral dissertations, remains, and each chapter contains both an introduction and a substantial conclusion, an imbalance compounded by a summarizing chapter entirely devoted to repeating all of this earlier material. Much repetition is also to be found within the main chapter texts with the same points offered over and over again constituting considerable duplication within 299 pages, of which more than 100 are dedicated to scholarly apparatus. The bibliography is a strange mixture. There are a number of products of Osprey Publishing but no mention of the recent Military History of Scotland (Edinburgh, 2012), edited by Edward Spiers, Jeremy Crang, and Matthew Strickland. Other standard works are passed over or rejected on the grounds that they pay insufficient attention to Scotland although the explanation for this is to be found in her own work. Within an already short book, the core content is rather thin. The opening chapter, “Scotland's Professional Soldiers,” includes little original material and is principally a digest of existing literature while the fifth, “Scotland's Military Installations,” draws heavily from British Barracks by James Douet, rendered as “Donet” throughout footnotes and bibliography, and The Military Roads in Scotland by William Taylor. Thus the original research is mostly confined to the central three chapters, decidedly short measure for either a PhD thesis or resultant monograph.

The title is problematical. Nothing of military significance happened in either 1700 or 1750: the period actually under consideration runs from about 1688, or even 1660, to the Seven Years' War. The subtitle, “Defending the Union,” creates another difficulty because there is no systematic discussion of the Union as an event in military history except in relation to the militia. Henshaw tries to fill this lacuna by arguing, as have others, that the Union did not have a profound effect on the northern regiments because the English, Irish, and Scottish standing armies had effectively formed a single entity since 1689 and the purges following the Glorious Revolution had created a thoroughly Whiggish and pro-Union officer corps. Indeed, but the Union was partly a martial event. The threat of civil disorder, especially from Dumfries, Galloway, Ayrshire, and Lanarkshire, involved sizeable troop deployments and security measures in England, Ulster, and Scotland. An entire establishment was dissolved and incorporated into the Westminster War Office with concomitant impacts upon administration, funding, careers, clientage, and units. Given that the Union informs the book's central arguments, its processes, achievements, and aftermath cannot be so lightly brushed aside. To employ a contemporary phrase, there is an “elephant in the room.” These flaws might have been avoided had the book been arranged around a chronological spine and a longer time span, say 1688–1763: the Union could not then have been so easily circumvented. A thematic approach can so easily miss the fundamentals of history: events and the study of change through time.