Scholars such as Colin Calloway and Kevin Kenny have asked how Celtic Irish and Scottish Highlanders interacted with indigenous peoples in the British Empire and the United States, but the subject was given more attention at a conference held at two venues in Ontario in 2010, and the editors of this volume selected fifteen of the contributors to prepare chapters. I report on seven of these chapters and David Wilson's introduction.

Wilson raises several questions, the more significant can be reduced to these two: Were these Celtic folks more (or possibly less) appreciative and empathetic toward indigenous peoples than were their English counterparts? How much did their own experiences with English oppression lead them to identify with the oppression being experienced by the indigenous in the empire? Wilson derives from the authors' findings that specific situations Celtic newcomers found themselves in largely explained whether they got along well with the Indigenous or went to war with them. Brad Patterson's essay on Highland Scots in North Island New Zealand is an example of this site-specific condition: Highlanders settled in Turakina, North Island. Young Alexander MacDonald learned the Maori tongue and gained the trust of the local Ngati Apa, who were in need of armed allies against powerful Maori tribes to their north. For years the Turakina Highland settlers and the Ngati Apa lived in peace, via mutual support. In 1867 MacDonald's use of violence on the Maori's behalf landed him in jail for three years. Upon his release, the Maori bestowed eight hundred acres of their land on him to support his family. In time, this mutual relationship led to the establishment of the Turakina Caledonian Games.

Donald Akenson, the book's most free-swinging contributor, indicts Celtic and English alike for “they participated in a system that, at best, was gargantuan theft—and, at worst, genocide,” no matter what their degree of contact with the Indigenous might have been. Akenson claims: “The systemic character of the market-based economic system means that the man at the [Pittsburgh] blast furnace shoveling coal from mines dug on lands alienated from their original owners and the [New Haven] housewife doing laundry and mending for men who worked in the Winchester Repeating Arms factory were just as much a part of the conquest of this particular New World as if they had been building a sod hut on the Kansas prairies” (35–36). Akenson is more nuanced than this in his analysis of Irish interactions with the indigenous in his If the Irish Ruled the World (1997), a study of the takeover of Montserrat. And his assertion (26–27) that historical accounts on the ruthless expansionism of the United States are lacking is incorrect; an ample literature of that sort exists.

Ann McGrath effectively questions the way leading historian of Australia Patrick O'Farrell had portrayed the Irish in Australia. O'Farrell claimed that “in contrast to Protestant paternalist or exploitative whites, Irish Catholics treated the Aborigines as human beings, equals” (111). McGrath points out that Englishmen in Australia often derogatorily equated the Catholic Irish and the Scottish Highlanders with the Aborigines. She allows that Irish nuns have recently been active in lobbying for Aboriginal pastoral rights. But she notes that “among the ‘good’ [Irish] were also plenty of violent and corrupt police, rapacious frontiersmen, timber getters and boat crew, unscrupulous and murderous squatters, and dubious missionaries” (123, 128). The same may be said of Patricia McCormack's contribution on the interaction of Lewis and Orkney Island Scots with the Cree while on contract for the Hudson's Bay Company. Some learned the Cree culture and language, some intermarried, but, she notes, “the sad reality is that the once exploited Scots did not hesitate to exploit Aboriginal people and even to replicate the abuse they themselves had suffered” (269). Michael Newton offers an informed reading of the verses of Scottish Gaels to counter the view that Highlanders conceived of the indigenous merely as savages to be fought, and Anne Lederman offers the music of modern Canadian First Nations and Meti fiddlers to establish that they owe a debt to the contributions of Highland (and French) fiddlers whose musical cultural they had embraced as evidence of more positive interactions.

Kevin Hutchings closes the volume with a careful and convincing analysis of the novels and other views of John Buchan. Buchan (1875–1940) was, as he put it, one quarter Highlander, but in 1927 he dismissed the notion of a distinctive Celtic Scot, saying: “Let's get rid of the word ‘Celtic’ altogether. Every part of Scotland is more or less a racial mixture” (343). A British civil servant for most of his adult life, he initially embraced Kipling's notion of “the white man's burden” in novels like Prester John (1910). But Buchan's fascination with North American Indians led him to reach out to Canada's First Nations when he was given a peerage in 1935, and he served for nearly six years as Canada's governor-general. These interactions gave him a more realistic sense of who they were and what they sought, and he became their champion. The “scourge of tuberculosis” and lack of “better medical attendance” (355) to their needs was, he argued, unconscionable. Buchan called as well for “a policy of increasing of the Indian trapping reserves and making them wholly exclusive [of ‘the white trapper’]” (356). His posthumously published novel, Sick Heart River (1941), stands in sharp contrast to his earlier novels, in that it offers understanding and appreciation of the Hare Indians of the Northwest Territories and of two Highland-Cree Metis who helped his autobiographical character.

What of our two questions? These essays and the work of several other scholars have provided rich evidence that may ultimately be synthesized into credible answers to the second question, but the first of these questions deserves more attention: Did Catholic Irish and Highland Scots really differ from English men and women in their interactions with indigenous peoples in the British Empire, and if so, in what ways?