That there was a potential area of study concerning Scotland's relationship with America was signalled in the first half of the twentieth century by individual scholarly essays and lectures on such topics as “Ossian in America,” “Robert Burns and the American Revolution,” “Thomas Campbell and America,” “Early Scotch Contributions to the United States,” and perhaps John H. Finley's 1940 book The Coming of the Scot. But the launching pad for our contemporary engagement with the field was a special issue of the William and Mary College Quarterly in April 1954, containing a series of essays on the Scottish American theme by such scholars as John Clive and Bernard Bailyn, Jacob M. Price, and George Shepperson. In the following decades further work appeared, including my own Princeton Ph.D., published in 1975 as Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750–1835 (second edition 2008), but it was in the period of the bicentennial celebrations of the Declaration of Independence that the subject really took off. So much research and publication has appeared since then that few scholars today would dispute the idea that, say, the Scottish Enlightenment made a major contribution to the developing culture of colonial, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary America. To that impressive body of recent scholarship, Alexander Murdoch's book is a most welcome addition.

Relatively short, the book is in two parts. The first concerns ‘Scottish Trade and Settlement in America’, the second ‘Transatlantic Scotland: Cultural Exchange between Scotland and America’. Part One, that is, updates and expands our knowledge of Scottish emigration, the transatlantic trading link, and the Scottish attempt to create an empire in America. Canada and the West Indies are included in the detailed analysis. ‘Cultural Exchange’ in the title of Part Two is marginally misleading given that the topics addressed are restricted to Scottish involvement in slavery, Scottish relations with native Americans, and transatlantic Scottish Presbyterianism. Murdoch, that is, chooses not to focus on what has become the prime subject of the Scottish American bibliography: eighteenth-century Scotland's contribution to the educational, philosophical, intellectual and political life of the emerging USA. However, through his account of Scottish American Presbyterianism, Murdoch is able to validate one of the underlying themes of his book: how the traffic between the countries was never entirely one-way.

In a short epilogue, Murdoch glances at what has become one of the more public outcomes of the scholarly recovery of Scottish influences on the creation of the USA. He notes the adoption, in both Canada and the US, of 6 April as National Tartan Day to celebrate Scotland's contribution to both countries. The relevant Senate resolution in 1998 even insists that the Declaration of Independence was modelled on the Scottish Declaration of Arbroath: the 6 April 1320 letter to the Pope in which the Scottish nobility ask for the recognition of Robert the Bruce as the legitimate king of Scotland. Murdoch is rightly sceptical. However appealing to Scottish politicians, and Scottish national pride more generally, this idea lacks historical evidence. The key point is that the letter was called just that – a letter – until well into the twentieth century. The authoritative eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910–11), for example, in its entry on Arbroath, describes the letter but fails to call it the Declaration of Arbroath. In other words, the emergence of that term is a fine example of how, as Alexander Murdoch is keen to argue, it is sometimes America that influences Scotland.