What does it say about Scottish identity that one of the most popular exhibits at the National Museum is the stuffed body of Dolly the Sheep, the first successful clone of a mammal from an adult cell? Alima Bucciantini never answers this question, but Exhibiting Scotland does trace, albeit in circuitous ways, the centuries-long effort to create a national museum in Scotland and the relationship between this process and the development of Scottish national identity.

To be sure, Scottish identity is a complex subject. Scotland ceased to exist as an independent state in 1707 but retained considerable autonomy in its educational and legal systems, as well as in its religious and cultural life. Meanwhile, competing visions of Scotland circulated domestically and internationally. As Bucciantini puts it, there is Highland Scotland, which she discusses in the context of the 2007 Fonn's Duthchas: Land and Legacy touring exhibition that celebrated Highland culture as a stand-in for Scotland as a whole; Lowland Scotland; and even “Hollywood Scotland” (134). Bucciantini argues that modern “Scottishness” emerged in relation to “Englishness” in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, when the British government banned the wearing of Highland dress. This is important because she also claims that Scottish national identity of the sort that could be put on display in a museum could be acknowledged only after Scotland's union with England had solidified—that is, after the threat of Jacobitism had passed. This led to the formation of Scotland's Society of Antiquaries in 1780, which became the first museum in, if not entirely of, Scottish history.

But there are complications here that Bucciantini does not address. As Linda Colley demonstrated in Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1992), it was during the eighteenth century that a British national identity emerged, which raises questions about how British and Scottish identities could have developed at the same time, or how they might relate to one another. Bucciantini writes, “It is often easier to define what you are through what you are not” (9), a phrase that bears a remarkable similarity to Colley's assertion that “men and women decide who they are by reference to who and what they are not” (Britons, 6), yet Colley's book is not mentioned, even in the notes. If nothing else, this is a missed opportunity to explore the formation of Scottish national identity against that of its English neighbor and alongside the formation of a British identity defined against Britain's Catholic rivals France and Spain.

To be fair, Bucciantini does not aim to trace the development of Scottish identity though the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; instead, she seeks to illuminate the complex story surrounding the bevy of institutions that eventually coalesced into the National Museum of Scotland. This museum formed in 2006 with the merger of the Museum of Scotland, which had previously operated as the National Museum of Antiquities, with collections covering Scottish culture and history; and the adjacent Royal Scottish Museum, which focused on science and technology, having opened in 1854 as the Industrial Museum of Scotland to educate working-class Scots about the industrial arts, although it also included natural history artifacts, which meant it had no “overarching narrative and no concern with the particular history of the nation” (4). The National Museum of Antiquities, which opened in 1858 with Iron, Stone, and Bronze Age artifacts, also did not “say anything about the particular history of Scotland” (16); rather, it was, Bucciantini writes insightfully, “a national museum and … [a] museum of antiquities but not the museum of the nation” (27).

When the Museum of Scotland opened in 1998—Bucciantini says nothing about the intervening century or whether there were any efforts to create a national museum during that time, nor does she even mention the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, founded in 1889—the impetus came, “oddly” (19), from a traveling exhibition of treasures from the Smithsonian Institution in in Washington, DC, which made its way to Edinburgh in 1994. At the time, Thatcher's Conservative Party was deeply unpopular in Scotland, and Scotland was “beginning to actively define itself as ‘different’ from the rest of Great Britain” (22). What follows, however, is a long digression about the origins of the Smithsonian and the selection of objects for the traveling show (such as Judy Garland's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz), which have nothing to do with Scottish national identity or the creation of a Scottish national museum. Nor does Bucciantini explore the irony that “visitors entering the Royal Scottish Museum were first encountering American national objects” (46).

The strength of this book, particularly for those interested in public history and museology, lies in the broad questions that Bucciantini raises, even if her analysis does not always provide answers. She observes, for example, that “Objects are the means through which curators and other museum professionals create the stories that museums tell” and that “these stories … make museums important civic places” (3). In this context, it would have been useful to know what sorts of reviews the Museum of Scotland received when it opened and to learn more about how it was perceived and functioned as a public space. But this would have conflicted with Bucciantini's ostensible focus on “curatorial intent, rather than visitor perception and reception theory” (6), although there is little analysis of memoranda or correspondence that would illuminate this intent, nor does Bucciantini seem to have interviewed any curators about the selection and display of objects. Moreover, Bucciantini later acknowledges that “[e]xhibitions are read by visitors, and each visitor and each time period creates different visions of the object on display” (65). This is surely true, and thus it is not enough to focus solely on curatorial intent.

As for the analysis of objects, Bucciantini observes—several times—that museum objects are “multivocal” (39, 64, 65, 67, 112, 197), although she discusses very few of them. One of the more complicated choices is the Newcomen engine, since the inventor was English and since the particular engine on display in the museum is not unique. It was, however, made in Scotland and symbolizes the industrialization of Scotland. Bucciantini highlights “the transition from machine to artifact” (80) and “the line between artifact and architecture” (82), since a portion of the museum was built around this enormous and iconic piece of machinery. There is less, however, about the “political undertone[s]” (49) of objects.

In short, Exhibiting Scotland raises interesting issues but is unfortunately as convoluted as the history that it traces. There is clearly a “connection between national museums and the production of national narratives” (3), although the process by which this takes place is underexplored. Perhaps part of the problem is that the development of Scotland's national narrative has itself been halting, complicated, and remains incomplete.