Scotland: A History is a stimulating and engaging collection of essays on the state of Scotland, in both senses of that phrase, from early medieval to modern times. Fifty years of scholarship have laid prior assumptions of Scottish backwardness and inwardness to rest, and these essays reveal a dynamic and, perhaps above all, resilient nation unusually open to outside influences and the wider world in general. “This is a book,” the editor Jenny Wormald stresses in her introduction, “about a remarkably positive, confident, and successful kingdom” (xx).

Medievalists have done much of the heavy lifting in constructing a more positive and convincing assessment of the Scottish past. Katherine Forsythe's superb opening chapter assays the traces left behind, and sometimes kicked over, by the Picts, Gaels, Britons, Angles, and Vikings of northern Britain who, by the tenth century, were caught up in the European-wide process by which recognizable kingdoms and common cultures began to coalesce. The real coalescence, however, came in the period 1100–1300, vividly recounted here by Keith Stringer. Scotland's rise to territorial coherence, middle power status, and national consciousness has long been overshadowed by England's achievements, but the judicious blend of established Celtic and innovative English practices overseen by Scottish kings constituted “one of the great state-building feats of these centuries” (39). For Michael Brown and Steve Boardman, the broad appeal of that distinctive Scottish polity, more than newly minted ideals of nationhood, ensured, in the editor's pithy phrase, that “neither mighty English kings nor weak Scottish ones” (xvii) could quite undo the kingdom in the fourteenth century. In the fifteenth century, those evolving forms of government, community, law, and custom provided a platform on which more capable kings erected, not without difficulty, a revived monarchy that dominated and dazzled in true Renaissance fashion.

Themes of cultural confidence and political resilience also inform the chapters by early modernists. Roger Mason deftly refashions the sixteenth century as an era of Renaissance continuities as well as Reformation ruptures. Royal sponsorship of Renaissance humanism and educational reform early in the century secured Scotland's ties to European culture, helped inspire religious reform, and spawned an educated elite, who James VI could call upon to enforce order, civility, and royal authority in the localities. Jenny Wormald tackles the unloved seventeenth century, seemingly bereft of the vibrancy attributed to centuries fore and aft. When James VI took the crown south in 1603, the Kirk became the most potent available focus of national identity. The godly society was never as unified or as uniformly grim as is often supposed, but the follies of Charles I gave radical theocrats and their myths of manifest destiny an otherwise unlikely opening, and the ensuing two decades of ruinous war, revolution, conquest, and occupation cast a pall over the rest of the century. The road to recovery ran through Westminster. Political independence was surrendered in the union of 1707, but by retaining its own church, law, and educational system, Scotland secured its cultural independence and “regained the confidence of the pre-1603 past” (168). Richard Sher sees the eighteenth century a bit differently. In addition to the towering achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment, Scots took spectacular advantage of their access to the newly British empire and achieved dramatic transformations in commerce and industry, agriculture and urban life, and religion and society. For Sher, however, the spur to success was not reconstituted sixteenth-century confidence but the seventeenth-century legacy of “national self-doubt and uncertainty” (178) that drove Scots to seize every new opportunity to prove themselves to themselves and to the English. He also detects that strand of insecurity in leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, with their sensitivity to matters of national development and belief in the ambivalent nature of progress.

Sher notes that not everyone shared in the fruits of eighteenth-century successes, and the markedly unequal effects of economic progress dominate the chapters on modern Scotland. Iain Hutchison's numbers encapsulate the dizzying changes of the 1800s, when the population nearly tripled and industrialization and agricultural reforms pulled and pushed people into the cities. Glasgow grew tenfold and emerged as a world leader in heavy industry. Landowners and capitalists grew rich, and the celebrated educational system gave the middle classes and skilled labor a leg up. Yet the scale and depth of immiseration experienced by the newly urban masses were even worse in Scotland than in England. As for the national psyche, Scots were intensely conscious of their distinct identity but content with a union they associated with economic growth and imperial opportunity. But as Richard Finlay explains, confidence crumbled after 1914 as class conflict and franchise reform made it harder to ignore the downside of progress. Times were tough across Britain in the interwar years but worse in Scotland, where heavy industry nearly keeled over. War again delayed industrial reform but showed what a managed economy might do. Postwar government investment helped spur full employment as incomes, health, and housing finally improved. Thatcherite rhetoric and the withdrawal of state subsidies in the 1980s sparked deindustrialization, massive unemployment, virulent anti-Toryism, the rise of the Scottish National Party (SNP), economic recovery and, yes, renewed national confidence—all of which fed the great push for devolution that culminated in the reestablishment of a Scottish parliament in 1999.

In his truly wide-ranging chapter on the Scottish diaspora, David Armitage reminds us that Scottish history is transnational history. Scots have been venturing out into the world—mostly voluntarily—for as long as there has been a Scotland and have shown an uncanny ability to assimilate elsewhere without surrendering their sense of Scottishness. They may also, he suggests, have shown the way of the future since globalization favors peoples accustomed to mobility, adaptability, and maintaining cultural ties across time and space. That Armitage's tour de force would have made a fine ending to the book is no slight on Sally Mapstone's scholarly analysis of medieval and Renaissance literary expressions of Scottish national identity. But the undoubted influence of these texts on Scottish culture after 1603 is left for the reader to ponder, and the chapter sits oddly at the end of the book.

No book can be all things to all people, least of all a collection of such sweeping ambition. The essays here are in many ways state of the art, ranging, as the editor promises, far beyond traditional political narratives. Inevitably, the very impression of comprehension raises questions as to what more might have been said or what might be missing. Every reader will have their own list, but gender is likely to be near the top of most: women who did not rule are seldom mentioned, matters of gender difference are never really addressed, and an opportunity was missed to add a vital and potentially transforming dimension to this collective vision of Scotland and Scottishness. That large concern aside, this beautifully illustrated and attractively priced book deserves to be widely read and discussed.