When most people think of Scots in Ulster they think, naturally enough, of the so-called Ulster Scots, people whose forebears arrived in northeast Ireland during the plantations of the seventeenth century and whose culture, by the late nineteenth century, had become almost synonymous with that of Ulster itself. The presence of these proud, pious, flinty Presbyterians (a stereotype that has been among the more useful self-constructed myths in Irish history) was, and is, often cited by Unionists as evidence that Ulster is more British than Irish and ought, therefore, to remain part of the United Kingdom. Given the prominence of the Ulster Scot myth, one imagines that Kyle Hughes had to correct more than a few misconceptions while working on this book. For, as he lucidly demonstrates, being a Scot in Ulster during the Victorian and Edwardian period was not at all the same as being an Ulster Scot. In identifying this mismatch between Scots as they actually were and Scots as their Belfast hosts thought they should be, he turns what might have been a workmanlike but unambitious study of Scottish migration into a fascinating tale of a migrant group in the awkward (and perhaps historically unique) position of being granted automatic belonging by their host society—but only on condition that they conformed to the distorted picture that their host society had of them, which also happened to be the picture that the host society had of itself.

There are three strands to Hughes's study. The first, confined to the first chapter, is a demographic analysis of Scots living in Belfast at the turn of the century. Using a database of some 9,000 Scottish-born residents of Belfast identified in the 1901 census, Hughes expertly constructs a profile of the city's Scottish population according to sex, religion, occupation, age, and residential patterns. Amply illustrated by charts and graphs, this chapter offers few surprises—Scots, we learn, were relatively affluent and clustered in the professions and skilled trades—but it provides a good springboard for further research, especially into non-elite Scots and other migrants. It also reminds us that, far from being a one-way transaction, migration happened in many directions across the Irish Sea. Many Scottish-born Catholics, for instance, were undoubtedly return migrants whose families had earlier moved to Scotland from Ireland. It is unlikely that these “Scots” would have identified themselves as such, nor would they have been accepted into the traditionally Protestant-dominated occupations that welcomed other Scots. In Hughes's words, “Being born in Scotland was no defence against Belfast's existing sectarian market forces for Scottish Catholics” (54).

The second strand of the book concerns the contributions of individual Scots to Belfast's industrial, cultural, political, and religious life; chapters 2–5 deal with each of these elements in turn. Here the focus shifts from the Scots in general to the elite migrants of the subtitle, each chapter examining a handful of emblematic men and organizations whose stories demonstrate the centrality (or otherwise) of Scots to the civic culture of Belfast. The strongest field of Scottish endeavor was industry; Hughes (wisely) violates his own periodization to demonstrate Scots' crucial contributions to Belfast's early industrial history, and he also demonstrates how their continued industrial prowess led them to positions of municipal power. Scots, he shows, were to be found in virtually all areas of civic leadership at one time or another.

The third strand of the book, and by far the most rewarding, is Hughes's analysis of the mismatch between how Scots were perceived and how they actually were. This comes through most clearly in the chapter on politics, although it is also evident in the chapter on religious life. Politically, the fundamental problem was that Unionists in Belfast expected their Scottish neighbors to be Unionists, too. Many of them were, but many were not, for being Unionist usually meant being Conservative, and Scotland itself was a strongly Liberal place. What made the anomaly of a pro-Home Rule Scot even more perplexing for Ulster Unionists was that the Unionist creed drew so heavily upon a notion of Ulster distinctiveness that was based, in part, upon the region's own historic Scottishness. Both in the areas of politics and religion, as Hughes demonstrates, local Protestants and Unionists sometimes—not always, but sometimes—engaged in the unedifying spectacle of deriding Scots who failed to toe the party line as “outsiders” who did not understand the Ulster psyche. As Hughes wryly observes, such xenophobic attitudes directly contradicted Ulster Protestants' claims to a broader British (or, indeed, specifically Scottish) identity; Hughes never uses the word “hypocritical” to describe such attitudes, but this is clearly what they were.

Overall this is a fine, diligent study of a curiously neglected aspect of Irish history: we have many studies of the people who left Ireland but very few of the people who moved there. Hughes has embedded his work in an impressive range of literatures (on global Scottish migration, Irish politics, diaspora studies, Ireland-and-Empire studies, and more), and he presents his arguments with wit and clarity. If the discussion of Scottish contributions to Belfast society can sometimes veer toward the hagiographical, his skeptical attitude toward the hyperbole-prone local press, and his critical reading of host responses to Scottish migrants, restores the balance somewhat. Perhaps the only major omission here is an examination of the subjective responses of Scots themselves to life in Belfast. We see these migrants principally through the pages of the press, giving boilerplate speeches or engaging in some public controversy, but we never quite get a sense of their interior life. What led them to migrate to Belfast? What convinced them to stay? Why did some Scots decide to embrace Home Rule, even in the face of hostility from their “own” people? Such questions may be difficult to answer from the available sources, but one suspects that at least a few of these “elites” might have left some record of what, exactly, they made of their new home.