Empire and Scottish Society examines the role of foreign missions in shaping Scottish understandings of empire and explores the vision of Scottish identity as expressed in the missionary enterprise. Empire, Esther Breitenbach argues, was part of everyday life for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Scots, and the church-based mission movement was a central means by which they engaged with it. Through their fellow Scots on mission, those at home not only obtained factual knowledge about the empire, they encountered representations of the colonial “other” and evidence of Scots’ active participation in the imperial endeavor. Several scholars have argued that Scottish civil society was an important carrier of Scottish national identity, because it provided a form of Scottish autonomy. While many civil society organizations promulgated ideas about empire, Breitenbach argues that the foreign mission movement was particularly influential. Its long duration and its institutional relationship with Presbyterian congregations enabled it to reach a substantial proportion of the Scottish population. The secular press disseminated even more broadly a vision of the missionary enterprise as a specifically Scottish contribution to empire, especially in the late nineteenth century.

Focusing particularly on Edinburgh and the two main Presbyterian churches, Breitenbach examines missionary literature, which includes pamphlets, periodicals, sermons, speeches, annual reports, and biographies, as a source for understanding how missionaries and their supporters represented empire and their role in it. While many of the markers of religion, race, gender, and class discerned in this literature were widely shared by other Christian missionaries in Britain and Europe, Breitenbach also finds a distinctively Scottish identity, centered on Presbyterianism and belief in the importance of education in the missionary enterprise. Disputes between the Church of Scotland and the Free Church rarely spread to the mission field, where there was considerable support for cooperation between the Presbyterian churches. References to other denominations, however, reinforced a common Presbyterianism; differences from Anglicanism were clear. Missionary literature situated the enterprise within the context of Presbyterian history, describing missionaries, for instance, as carrying on the heritage of John Knox or the tradition of the Reformation. Thus, Breitenbach finds that, despite religious divisions of the nineteenth century, Presbyterianism remained central to Scottish understandings of national identity in this period. She argues further that Scottish identity was not subsumed under British identity but differentiated from it. Scottishness was always privileged among the varieties of available “national” identities. Although “British,” “Scottish,” and even “English” references were constantly negotiated, she discerns among missionaries little sense of tension between these various forms of “national” identification.

Coverage of foreign missions increased in the secular press in the period after 1870, which suggests growing popular interest in the movement. Although missionaries tended to distance themselves from imperial ambitions, the secular press utilized the foreign mission enterprise as means of claiming Scottish leadership and achievement in the empire. This was most commonly done through the vision of a “civilizing mission” to Africa, embodied and inspired by David Livingstone. Livingstone was claimed as a Scottish hero, the “typical Scot,” who thus represented Scotland's particular contribution to the imperial enterprise.

Empire and Scottish Society is well-grounded in the secondary literature on nineteenth-century Scottish identity and religion but less so in recent literature on empire. Breitenbach's conclusions are well substantiated with solid primary research and nicely considered within the historiography on nineteenth-century Scotland. However, her analysis might have been enriched and her conclusions broadened with wider reading in, for instance, Catherine Hall's work on English middle-class identity in relation to empire or Antoinette Burton's studies of gender, nationalism, and imperial culture. A fuller consideration of the wider social and religious context of foreign missions might also have enhanced her understanding of the movement's significance. Breitenbach notes briefly that these late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century claims of a Scottish contribution to empire were being made at the same time that Scottish nationalists were becoming more vocal within the political arena, but she does not follow through on this intriguing observation. Similarly, she contends, but with little analysis, that the middle classes’ involvement in, and support of, the missionary movement enabled them to reassert their own power and authority and that of the Presbyterian churches in a period of social and political change. This is a significant consideration of the importance of the movement, but one that bears deeper examination.

Nonetheless, Breitenbach's assessment of the ways in which the foreign mission movement enabled Scots to differentiate their sense of Scottishness within a wider British framework, and the centrality of Presbyterianism within that understanding of Scottishness, is a valuable addition to the historiography on national identity within the British Isles. The book is also a useful contribution to discussions of the impact of empire at home. Breitenbach includes appendixes listing missionary periodicals published in Scotland between 1796 and 1914 and brief biographical details of several Scottish missionaries. These are likely to be helpful for future scholars of Scottish overseas missions.