Although the Scottish regiments of the British army have attracted consistent popular interest since the nineteenth century, only a handful of academic historians have written about them as serious historical subjects. This has remained the case even though historians of popular imperialism have repeatedly pointed to the late Victorian Scottish soldier as one of the penultimate symbols of British imperial self-confidence and prowess. In The Scottish Soldier and Empire, Edward Spiers seeks to give Scottish soldiers their scholarly due. He is certainly well placed to do so: in the past twenty-five years, Spiers has authored a wide variety of books on the Victorian army, on Victorian campaigns and Victorian soldiers in Africa, and on individual military figures from the Victorian era.

Spiers's central argument is twofold. He begins with the basic premise that the image of the Scottish soldier was an important factor in solidifying late Victorian Scottish national identity as well as in making the imperial mission more popular in Scotland. Underlying this premise, however, is the more original argument that it was the voices of Scottish soldiers themselves that “played a critical role in embedding an understanding of [their] values within the public consciousness both within Scotland and beyond” (214). This participation in the creation of their own image, Spiers argues, was made possible by correspondence written during imperial campaigns that was then reproduced in metropolitan newspapers. Indeed, although Spiers does not discount the role played by official war correspondents and professional artists in helping to create the image of the Scottish soldier as imperial hero, he nevertheless insists that letters written by soldiers themselves were equally important.

The book consists of nine chapters, the first of which introduces the history of the Scottish soldier as imperial hero in the wake of the Crimean War and the 1857 Indian Rebellion. The rest of the chapters focus on imperial campaigns that helped highlight, reinforce, or otherwise publicize the exploits of Scottish soldiers in the field. The chapters are arranged chronologically, beginning with the role of the Black Watch in West Africa and moving through campaigns in South Africa, Afghanistan, Egypt, the Sudan, and India's Northwest Frontier. The final two chapters explore aspects of the Anglo-Boer War—especially the disastrous battle of Magersfontein and the role of Scottish citizen-soldiers in the campaign—in detail. The book's epilogue reflects on the legacy of the late Victorian period for the continuing popularity of the Scottish soldier into the Edwardian era and beyond.

Through his attention to individual campaigns—all of which attracted considerable attention in Britain itself—Spiers seeks to demonstrate both the ways in which soldiers wrote about their experiences and the ways those experiences were publicized and interpreted at home. He documents how soldiers’ letters could be critical in shaping public opinion about imperial wars, especially when they were printed in advance of official accounts written by war correspondents. In addition, as in the case of the Sudan campaigns, Spiers argues that the exploits of Scottish soldiers focused attention within Scotland on the merits—or the lack thereof—of the British imperial mission more generally. Over the last half of the nineteenth century, he concludes, consistent attention to the voices and adventures of Scottish soldiers led to a stronger sense of Scotland's role in the British Empire as well as an ever-deeper appreciation for what most Scots perceived as the gallantry and bravery of their compatriots in arms. By the end of the Anglo-Boer War in 1902, Spiers asserts that “the Scottish soldier retained an image and an imperial role that enjoyed a broad base of support across Scotland, irrespective of class, region or political affiliation” (212).

While Spiers's attention to Scottish soldiers is a welcome contribution to a surprisingly small historiography, The Scottish Soldier and Empire nevertheless suffers from a significant weakness that detracts from its overall force. Indeed, although the book promises to demonstrate that Scottish soldiers were instrumental in creating their own image and therefore in cementing an imperially laden Scottish identity, many of the individual chapters fail to deliver. Chapters 2–5, in particular, read like conventional military campaign histories. Readers are taken through narrative accounts of the campaigns concerned, but Spiers devotes little attention to analyzing the content of soldiers’ responses to events, or to how their accounts might be connected to the larger arguments of the book. While chapters 6 and 7 are more successful in this respect, it nevertheless seems that there are two separate, and not entirely compatible, books within the same cover: one that wishes to make an argument about Scottish identity and the imperial mission, and one that simply chronicles the major campaigns in which Scottish soldiers were involved. Both projects have merit individually, but taken together they leave the reader with a nagging sense of disconnect between narrative and analysis.