Ewen Cameron has had the task of producing the concluding volume in the reimagination of the Edinburgh History of Scotland series that first appeared from the typewriters of a range of different authors in the 1960s. It is welcome to have an update since so much has happened to Scotland over the last forty years, not least the opening of a national parliament and the rise and stuttering progress of oil exploration. Cameron's approach conforms to the remit of the series old and new in that it is resolutely political, with the themes of war and economy providing the supporting framework. Here the author's stated intention is to stand in distinction to recent multiauthor syntheses that have followed the themes of the social historian. The political approach is also chosen by the author for its historiographical gravitas to inveigh against those who assert that the modern period, the twentieth century in particular, remains something of a lacuna. And for all I might claim that so much of Scotland's history does not easily reveal itself when the eye is trained on the state and however much Cameron is informed by the work of sociologists and anthropologists, this reinvigoration of the political approach shows that the nation's history can be seen to transcend any debilitating selfhood after union.

Cameron uses the themes of the social historian, however, to set up the two halves of the book, with 1945 forming the axis. The opening narrative focuses on education, demographic change, and emigration, with each handled concisely, if a little curtly, as Cameron quickly displays his mastery over the literature. It is a difficult chapter, reflecting back to the decades leading up to 1880 while introducing what is to come. And it leaves me wondering whether more could have been teased out on the health and welfare of the nation, which affected all these processes, and why Scottish emigration was still deemed a paradox stemming from an urban-industrial society, when the biggest exodus happened after 1918 (a feature not mentioned until the narrative moves from emigration to the economy and then is revisited in chap. 6 in a discussion of interwar society). With the social history out of the way, the economy during 1880–1939 steams into attention. We are rightly warned off nostalgia for the Victorian heavy industries, confirming what others have argued that such sectors had their own imperfect employment record that later contributed to the malaise of the interwar depression.

The debate on home rule (for Ireland) structures Scotland's political history in the four decades from 1880 (chap. 3), and Cameron's summary of Gladstone's Midlothian Campaign is elegantly dealt with under the lovely title of “an exuberant verbosity.” Here the author sets up Unionism as a political ideology that developed into newer issues of old age pension and land reform, with Irish home rule losing its grip on the popular imagination upon Gladstone's retirement and death. There is some great coverage here of how we can (or cannot) interpret Roman Catholic adherence to Labour and the papacy's opposition to socialism, taking some of Scotland's debates of the dinner table and the pub into their international context. As well as examining how far Scottish politics kept its own agenda separate from England, Cameron shows that electoral divergence north and south of the border occurred much earlier than the 1970s (as is so often assumed). The Great War is presented as a state endeavor, of raising taxation to fund it, encouraging industry to equip it, as much as 1914 witnessed the first mass British army raised for over a century. There is still space, however, for some nice color on the process and impetus of volunteering, surely one of the most galvanizing events in the nation's twentieth century. By contrast there is not so much on the Anglo-Boer War, its public unraveling of the nation's state of health, and the reform of the Territorial Force that predated the mass mobilization of 1914 and conscription from 1916.

It seems a little strange to prioritize society over economy for the interwar period (chap. 6), but there is a good summary of demography, housing, football, hunger, religion, landownership, leisure, and education—a rather eclectic grouping it has to be said, but produced to define a period that would so suddenly transform with the outbreak of an even more expansive world war in 1939. Chapter 7 is purely political on the breakthrough of Labour and the unsteady transformation of the nationalists from pressure politics to political party. Scotland's social history gets its third run out in chapter 9 on the post-1945 period, but still there is little mention of culture as the structural issues of family, marriage, religion, social class, and housing are reexamined. Without delving into econometric history, Cameron's narrative on the structural changes in the Scottish economy post-1945 is suitably nuanced, debating the relative merits of entrepreneurship, the so-called culture of dependency (but where is the “myth being scotched”?), the increasingly interventionist attempts by government to first invest in and then manage key industries, and then the rise of new business infrastructures that accompanied non-Scottish and overseas’ ownership of companies, including the creation of branch plants and the slow-burning realization of the profits that oil exploration off Scotland's northeastern coast could return. The final four chapters, amounting to some 150 pages, cover Scotland's politics since 1945, with the 1970s warranting a single chapter. It is a fairly well-known story from the work of social scientists whose interest falls on Scottish nationalism, but there is much value in placing these developments in their longer historical context, and here Cameron is to be congratulated.