Britain, it has been said, went “statue mad” in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Scotland shared in this plethora of memorial building. All manner of individuals were commemorated in stone and bronze, but prominent subjects were Presbyterian divines from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as national warrior heroes, above all William Wallace and Robert Bruce. In this book James Coleman sets out to consider what these monuments meant to those who raised them, and what they signified to the wider Scottish nation. A striking feature of the unveiling ceremonies was the vast crowds that gathered to watch and participate. Statues and memorials mattered. Yet, as Coleman rightly observes, their meanings shifted over time. Nowadays, few Scots know of or attach much meaning to the Presbyterian martyrs—often Covenanters—who were so frequently memorialized, and who formed arguably the most important strand of Scottish nationality in the nineteenth century. They were remembered, reinvented, not as narrow-minded religious fanatics (which some were) but rather as martyrs in the cause of civil and religious liberty and constitutional government in Britain—not just Scotland—as promoted by the enormously influential secession ministers Archibald Bruce and Thomas McCrie. Figures who are still recognized and celebrated in the twenty-first century—Wallace and Bruce—mean different things now than they did 150 years ago. Wallace is currently promoted as a proto-nationalist, instigator of Scotland's struggle for independence from England (the predominant theme of the celebrations in June 2014 to mark the seven hundredth anniversary of Bannockburn), but in the nineteenth century he was often celebrated as the champion of proto-Unionism, the man whose actions had ensured that Scotland could be an equal partner in the British union rather than a subject nation.

Nationality is the prism through which Coleman conducts his investigation. Memorialization was a Europe-wide (and even transatlantic) phenomenon in the nineteenth century that helped nations define their collective characters and distinctiveness. To a greater or lesser extent, nationality depended upon the possession of a shared sense of or belief in a national history, which in turn provided a common purpose for the present. In the search for a national identity, written history had a part to play, but more important was collective or cultural memory, which was secured in various ways, not least through commemorative acts that included celebrating totemic anniversaries and erecting monuments. These are the main concerns for Coleman in this book. What he demonstrates is that despite differing readings of Scotland's past, especially at the fringes, central to the Scots' sense of nationality were a series of struggles for independence and against tyranny—hence Wallace and Bruce against England's Plantagenet monarchy, John Knox and his Protestant reformers against the Roman Catholic Church, and the Covenanters in opposition to the later Stuart monarchs. It was a mythology of which Scots were proud and that induced enormous national confidence, even within the British union state. There was no shortage of symbols of nationality in nineteenth-century Scotland, even if some commemorative projects failed, as in the case of Edinburgh's grandiose National Monument on Calton Hill, the aim of which was to monumentalize Scottish national achievement. What is striking, however, is that at a time when the Scots had a clearer sense of their nationality than at any time before or since, the Union was rock solid, seen as the “legal seal” upon a providential journey that had begun with Wallace and culminated in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, for which Scotland's Covenanters had fought and died.

There were other readings of Scottishness, to be sure, such as those which emphasized the Jacobite tradition and highlighted 1746 as a key date, the occasion of the heroic deaths of so many Highlanders on the field of Culloden. Yet prior to the First World War, neo-Jacobite nationality led by Theodore Napier had little purchase and few supporters, although Coleman recognizes that the immediate prewar years did witness the emergence of a more aggressive anti-Union rhetoric and an alternative narrative, in which the Revolution of 1688–89 was portrayed as a diversion that had led to the unjust union of 1707, and the consequent crushing of the cause of Scottish independence at Culloden.

This is an important book that adds another dimension—popular and material—to the pioneering work on unionist nationalism by Graeme Morton, Colin Kidd's notion of “banal” unionism and how attachment in Scotland to the Union was sustained until the 1960s, and Ann Rigney's exploration of the multiple and shifting memories of Sir Walter Scott. The amount of primary source material Coleman has waded through—especially newspapers of the period—is impressive. Coleman's coverage is not comprehensive, nor does it claim to be. Wisely he notes that Robert Burns, probably the most commemorated Scot of all during the nineteenth century, merits another volume and would require another strand—the conceit of Scottish egalitarianism—to be woven somehow into his tapestry of Scottish nationality. There are weaknesses: judging by his endnotes and bibliography, Coleman seems unaware of the work on memorialization of Burns that has been published, while his emphasis on the importance of 1688–89 (as opposed to 1707), while welcome, is not original. It is to be regretted, too, that a book so focused on symbols, memorials, and mnemonics includes no illustrations. But this is to carp. Coleman has managed to turn his PhD thesis (Glasgow, 2005) into a highly accomplished, readable, and compelling book that serves as a model that should inspire further work in Scotland and elsewhere on the growing fields of cultural memory and memorialization.