Caledonian chronicle

RAB HOUSTON has mixed feelings about an energetic but uneven romp through four centuries of Scottish political, social, cultural and economic history

- RAB HOUSTON

While Scotland has existed, geographically, in roughly its present form for half a millennium, the small nation has adapted to huge political, economic and social transformations, from union and devolution to mass migration, industrialisation and deindustrialisation. It is rarely out of the British headlines these days, thanks to the prospect of another referendum on independence from the UK.

Interest in Scottish history, too, has never been stronger, fuelled by a dramatic rise in the number and quality of academic publications along with the modern popular histories that have been enriched by them. No longer parochial in outlook, historians of Scotland produce work explaining why its past matters, in terms that not only integrate research into global currents of scholarship, but also lead the way. Demand for one-stop accounts of Scotland's past and present has surged, and this book is one of many to meet this need.

Scotland: The Global History, 1603 to the Present

by Murray Pittock Yale, 512 pages, £25

The author is a professor of English literature as well as a historian. His original research is grounded largely in the 18th century, especially the Jacobites, though he has produced creditable work on Romanticism and on national identity. His discussion of Scotland's languages in this book is sure-footed, though beyond that the background research is eclectic, sometimes eccentric. And even when cheerleading the Jacobites, to whose manifestly lost cause Pittock is a modern-day adherent, the treatment is episodic and allusive.