At the entrance to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the leading resource for the region's academic historians, a notice informs the visitor that the “ingaun fur travellers” is “bae wye o tha screengin bothy.” These arresting coinages testify to the success with which a section of Northern Ireland's unionist community has in recent years appropriated the rhetoric of its nationalist opponents, by insisting that the concessions to Irish language and culture enshrined in the Good Friday agreement of 1998 should be matched by an equal recognition of their “Ulster Scots” equivalents. In doing so, however, they have only given a new twist to the much older idea of a distinctive “Scotch Irish” identity that has been part of the political mythology of both Ulster and the United States for well over a century.

Against this background of sometimes rancorous identity politics, the first of a proposed series of volumes from the Institute of Ulster Scots Studies at the University of Ulster provides an opportunity to take stock. Of the eleven papers, seven take an historical approach. John Young on interaction between Ulster and Scotland across the seventeenth century, and Patrick Fitzgerald on the more specific topic of migration in and out of Ulster, offer summaries of existing knowledge. Graham Walker, exploring support within Scotland for the Ulster unionist cause, demonstrates that this has in fact been consistently more equivocal than is often assumed. In the late nineteenth century the effects of a natural solidarity based on religious and cultural connections were muted by strong pro-Liberal and anti-Tory political allegiances. More recently there has been a marked reluctance among most of the inhabitants of what is by now a relatively secularized Scotland to be drawn into a sectarian quarrel too reminiscent, perhaps, of their own recent past. Mairtin Ó Catháin sets out to examine the social and political links between two second cities, Derry and Glasgow, though in practice his essay too frequently dwindles into a dutiful catalog of the Derry names that can be identified among the larger group of Ulstermen active—as Fenians, Home Rulers, or activists of other kinds—in the Scottish center. Steve Murdoch, in the most impressive essay in the volume, shows how the employment of so many Scots in Scandinavian armies in the seventeenth century created complex links between Ulster, Scotland, and the Baltic—explaining, for example, how the Enniskillen regiments who served William III so well at the Boyne and elsewhere came to be raised by the Swedish-born Gustavus Hamilton.

A number of papers directly tackle the question of Ulster-Scots identity. Young catalogs the different terms—“Irish,” “Scottish,” “Scottish Irish,” and “British”—used by contemporaries to describe seventeenth-century Scottish settlers in Ulster and their immediate descendants. The looseness of the terminology he reveals makes his closing claim that the term “Scotch-Irish” thus continues “an existing seventeenth-century … awareness” (32) somewhat suspect. Murdoch, more realistically, produces evidence to suggest that Scots born in both Scandinavia and Ulster during this period continued to see themselves simply as Scottish. Kerby Miller restates the familiar point that the idea of a distinctive “Scotch-Irish” identity in fact had its origins in the nineteenth-century United States, adopted by a group that had earlier called itself simply “Irish.” The emergence of the new ethnic label is often attributed to the concern of Americans of Ulster Protestant descent to draw a clear line of demarcation between themselves and the disreputable hordes of impoverished Catholic Irish that arrived from the 1840s onward. Miller, however, argues that its origins were in fact earlier, arising from the desire of “an emergent Ulster-American bourgeoisie” (117) to shed an earlier negative stereotype of the “wild Irish” (105) that had in fact been created by the often disorderly behavior of their own immigrant ancestors. Jock Philips provides a valuable alternative perspective on questions of identity by examining contrasting patterns of settlement in New Zealand, where Scots and Catholic Irish both developed their own subcultures, while Ulster Protestants were absorbed into an essentially English-based version of New Zealand Britishness.

Where literature and language are concerned, two papers are straightforward surveys. Richard Finlay examines conflicting commitments to Gaelic and Lowland Scots among interwar cultural nationalists, while Alan Titley offers a neatly turned study of parallels and contrasts in the genre, common to both Irish and Scottish Gaelic writing, of the rural autobiography. On the more controversial issue of language, David Horsburgh legitimately points out that Scots in the sixteenth century was not an inferior dialect of English, but an established language of state. But he also demonstrates that it lost that status in the century that followed. Language was one of the questions debated in the context of a proposed Anglo-Scottish union in 1604–7. By the time of the actual union, in 1707, it was not an issue. Michael Montgomery, dealing with contemporary linguistic politics, points out, again with justice, that “language” and “dialect” are points on a continuum rather than a simple dichotomy. Ulster Scots, in this perspective, is one of many “minority languages” caught “in a terminological and political web” (130). What this formulation ignores, however, is the equally important question of register: the variety of levels of precision and formality appropriate to differing contexts. That someone who calls a security hut a “screengin bothy” is not simply speaking “bad English” is clear enough. How far a visitor to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland can feel that he or she is being addressed in a credible language of public administration is perhaps a different matter.