Does the world need another book on Jacobites? The ’15 seems to have had little effect and did not cause fighting south of Preston or anywhere else but in Scotland where the casualties were few and the devastation minor compared to most civil wars. Reading Szechi's work convinces one that this book is not only needed but is a distinguished piece of work. It is a well-researched work by a scholar who has long been mining the archives for Jacobite materials and has previously made good use of his findings. Here he gives us an analytical account that seeks to understand why the rising or, as he sees them, uncoordinated risings took place when and where they did and what they show about the nature of Jacobitism. His study pays close attention to local conditions, to ideology, and to the social structures into which the actors fitted.

The first chapter tries to situate the rebellions in the economic, religious, and social contexts supplied by the differing Scottish, English, and Irish societies of 1715. In Scotland, dissatisfaction with the Union, economic problems partly caused by it but also by a postwar recession, and religious tensions had a decisive effect on the course of the rebellion. Most of these also marked the other kingdoms in differing ways that affected the outcomes in each. This section is the weakest part of the book, partly because it relies too much on older secondary sources. In the second chapter, Szechi finds a lot more Tories in Scotland than do most historians and sees the elections of 1715 as much affected by them and not only competitions between family groupings of various kinds of Whigs. He also shows why the international situation was one in which no foreign power in 1715 was much interested in helping the Jacobites. Despite that, they organized in Scotland, but not in England and Ireland, a “shadow-State” (52) and managed to arm and partly to train a significant number of men willing to risk everything in a rebellion that rational calculations would have found hopeless from the beginning. Moved by grievances over the union of 1707, the succession of the Hanoverians, economic distress, and religious concerns, Scots rose in an uncoordinated way. Despite the odds, the rebels raised (often through coercion) a large force, supplied it, and more or less trained it, although they could not keep recruits once the men had seen action or had booty to take home. About half deserted, although many later rejoined a unit. Szechi estimates that thirty thousand Scots were “out” with about two-thirds of them fighting in the Jacobite armies—“the largest number ever mobilised” in any Jacobite rising and a number nearly equaling that of the army of the Covenanters in the 1640s—“around 25,000” (126). The rising thus involved about 12 percent of the Scottish adult males. If one counts dependants, relatives, and spectators, half of the whole population was directly touched by the rising, and more were incidentally affected by its disruptions of life and the entailed costs. Szechi's account of the fighting traces the campaigns in the north and west of Scotland and the foray of Brigadier Mackintosh of Borlum into Fife and then England, but the major portion of this account is given to central Scotland, where the survival of the Duke of Argyll's outnumbered army at Sheriffmuir insured that the Jacobites would not have a quick victory and would be outlasted by opponents who had yet to bring all their forces to bear. The accounts of those little campaigns are clear and are accompanied by eleven useful maps. What impresses the author most is not the abilities (or lack of them) of the men and officers but the restraint they showed in the conduct of petite guerre even during the course of a dreadful winter. The Jacobites may have been doomed to fail, but they made a good showing. Even the Earl of Mar comes off better than he usually does.

Szechi's account of the aftermath finds the government ungrateful to its Scottish supporters but unable to be as harsh and vengeful as it wished to be. He is sure that if the lenient policies of Argyll had been followed after Sheriffmuir, the conflict would have ended earlier with less loss of life and damage to the economy. The king and others wanted a more decisive result that would end the threat from the Stuarts once and for all. That did not happen. Elite Scots were obstructive. They forgave the defeated, and, despite tensions, the victors and the defeated were able to coalesce again into a familiar, hierarchical, and paternalistic social world bound by customs and family ties. Few rebels were executed, although many were forced out of the country—the elite to Europe and many of lower rank to indentured servitude in the West Indies and America. Those who remained in Scotland often kept their property but forsook their beliefs or refused to act against a regime that had restored properties to them or even employed them. However, the distress to families that the rebellion caused and the disillusion produced by the failure of the rebellion damped the aspirations and willingness of Jacobites to try again until that generation of Scots had largely passed from the scene. That dampening was intensified by the unwillingness of Europeans to look after the exiled Jacobites and in the case of the French an inability after the failure of John Law's Mississippi Scheme to find the money to do so. Jacobites who had fled abroad found little support anywhere. The Hanoverians and their Whig ministers gained strength from the failure of the ’15. Scots knew more stability than they had had and the king's government was now recognized by European states as permanent. Britain enjoyed fifteen years of peace in which to prosper. This was not a rebellion lacking in interest or consequence. This is a well-indexed book that deserves a wide readership, but many will find the eleven portraits it contains fairly familiar.