Heather Streets's book sets out to explain how and why Scottish Highlanders, Punjabi Sikhs, and Nepalese Gurkhas came to be regarded, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as the British Empire's most formidable soldiers. For Streets this phenomenon has to be understood in the context of an ideology that portrayed these troops as members of “martial races,” biologically and culturally uniquely equipped for war.

Streets's persuasive analysis is pivoted around the 1857 Indian Rebellion. She sees it as an event that, because of the development of the British print media, had a qualitatively greater domestic impact than had previous colonial crises. In press representations of the war, a central place came to be taken by the massacre of British women and children at Cawnpore. Highlanders, who played a prominent part in such key actions as the relief of Lucknow, became the embodiment of manly British revenge. In Streets's argument, this was crucial to a general rehabilitation of the public reputation of the soldier in Britain in the late nineteenth century. Proponents of the martial races ideology presented the “mutiny” as showing that the high-caste Hindus, who comprised the bulk of the Indian Army before 1857, were treacherous, cowardly, and effeminate. They were contrasted with the “manly” Sikhs and others who had fought spiritedly for the British. Streets shows that subsequent to 1857, the Indian Army was systematically restructured, with the social and ethnic groups who had opposed the British being excluded and those who had remained loyal designated “martial races” and made the recruiting base of the army.

Streets is also extremely convincing in situating the elaboration of martial race ideology in late nineteenth-century British panics about a Russian military threat to the Indian Empire and the possibility of a French or German invasion on the home island. She shows how this fed a pervasive fear that the quality of both Indian and British troops might be unequal to such future wars, and how in turn the British officer corps intervened politically, especially through the press, to shape recruitment policy. Particularly impressive is Streets's analysis of the political and ideological role of Frederick Sleigh Roberts in the politics of Empire. Roberts, victor of the Second Afghan War, Commander in India, and the man who turned around the British Army's fortunes in the South African War, has been oddly neglected by historians of empire. For Streets he was the master propagandist of martial race ideology. Streets outlines how Roberts systematically manipulated British public opinion for decades, through his handling of war correspondents, selective leaking, and the extraordinary success of his autobiography. She demonstrates conclusively that the officer class's ideological interventions had important effects of British popular culture and politics.

Less convincing is Streets's argument for a connection between late-nineteenth-century Indian nationalism, Irish nationalism, and British feminism as a trio of threats that shaped the officer class's worldview. Certainly, given the high concentration of Anglo-Irish landowners in the British officer corps, agrarian and political dissent in Ireland was a serious concern for them throughout the period. But Streets exaggerates the strength of Indian nationalism and British feminism in the late nineteenth century. She would have been able to make a better case for the importance of these factors by focusing on the first decade of the twentieth century, when both movements were stronger and more militant. But those upsurges came too late to have been a major factor in the origins of martial race ideology.

The author could have given more detailed attention to situating the Highlander in the politics of Scotland. While she points out, usefully, that the loyal Scottish Highlander was contrasted with the unreliable Irish nationalist, one is left wanting to know more about how Highlander ideology played in Scotland itself.

Streets is excellent on the mobility of racial categories and the way in which they were manipulated by the officer class. “Highlanders” were predominantly lowland Scottish working-class men, while “Sikhs” were often recruited to the religion at the same time as to the army. Streets demonstrates how officers who based the authority their martial race theory on the claims of biology were nevertheless simultaneously able to recognize that their favored units were not racially “pure” and to convince themselves that it was enough for recruits to be inculcated with the ethos of the unit. Her contribution in showing how late Victorian racial ideology was used in a remarkably manipulative, self-conscious, and calculating way is of much wider importance for the study of the period.

Finally, the book looks at how the rank-and-file soldiers saw themselves. Streets seems oddly surprised that the martial race ideology of the regiments had a real impact on the troops, who bought into the idea of their special military qualities and gained social, personal, and economic benefits from it. Yet there is nothing really remarkable about the extent of Scots, Sikh, or Gurkha identification with their regiments. A vast body of military history and psychological studies have established that, almost across the board in modern armies, loyalty to a small unit has been the prime motivator for individual soldiers.

While the British officers certainly did elaborate a version of militarism for their recruits, this does not necessarily mean that it was a one-way process. In my view, Streets does not adequately explore the question of the extent to which rank-and-file soldiers contributed to the shaping of this myth. It might be useful to ask whether the ordinary soldiers were not sources for the materials that the officers introduced into their accounts of martial races? Did the Sikh, Scots, and Gurkha soldiers not bring their own historical narratives to their regiments?

Despite my reservations, this book is an excellent contribution to the new imperial history. The book is itself an example of how much might be gained by following Streets's urgings that new imperial historians pay greater attention to military history. It is also a salutary corrective to the view (now strangely resurgent) that Empire was somehow marginal to British social and political life in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.